


The Sound of Ocean Waves

by aurora_borealis



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-12 13:09:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 60,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28510947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurora_borealis/pseuds/aurora_borealis
Summary: Frances Mairead Odair is eleven when there are no options left to her but the local Family Home.(Frances Odair, Annie Cresta, and their lives.)
Relationships: Annie Cresta/Finnick Odair
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> content warnings throughout the whole story for sexual abuse, addiction, self-harm.

I

“ _There is a small area of land in Asia Minor that is called Armenia, but it is not so. It is not Armenia. It is a place. There are plains and mountains and rivers and lakes and cities in this place, and it is all fine, it is all no less fine than all the other places in the world, but it is not Armenia. There are only Armenians, and these inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia, gentlemen, there is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy, there is only the earth, gentlemen.”-_ “The Armenian and the Armenian”, William Saroyan

Frances Mairead Odair is eleven when there are no options left to her but the local Family Home. She supposes she’s a likely case for it- a father who left so long ago she can’t remember him, a morphling-addicted mother who has been deemed unfit by the authorities, a grandmother who would take her in but is no longer able to take care of a young girl, an uncle and aunt who cannot afford to be taking her in anymore. Although, sometimes Frances thinks maybe it’s that they don’t want to take her in anymore. But then, she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life in their house. She knows she isn’t wanted there.

“You shouldn’t be afraid of the Family Home,” her Uncle Cormac’s wife, Aunt Mara, had told her, with a tone that suggested Frances was just a stupid, fearful little girl who didn’t know what was good for her. “They exist to protect girls like you from ending up like your mother.” Her nails had dug into her palms when she’d heard that. _You and my uncle never protected my mother from ending up the way she did._ But there are some things you can never say.

(The last time Frances had stayed in Uncle Cormac’s house, she remembers Aunt Mara saying that girls from the Family Homes were all bad girls who came from bad homes. Street girls and whores and addicts and delinquents.)

“In that case maybe I’ll fit right in and make a lot of friends,” Frances had said, smiling, like she was going to a party. Although it had to have been clear she was sad and afraid and didn’t want to leave behind her mother. Her mother couldn’t help being sick. The districts didn’t have good enough medical care for people like her. She realizes this in a way she can articulate only later, when she sees her home from a distance. But now, as a child, all she can feel is a primal sense of unfairness, as if she and her mother haven’t been given a proper chance to get things right.

(“Maeve was always troubled,” Uncle Cormac had sighed one night during one of his and Mara’s many arguments Frances had overheard while she was pretending to watch television in their house. “That doesn’t mean we have to worry about Frances causing any trouble.”

“I tell you,” Mara had said, “that girl gets it from her mother.” Gets what, she’d wondered. Frances had wanted to cry but wouldn’t let herself. Good, she’d thought. I’d rather be like my mother than you.) 

_

At the Family Home, they give her a uniform, a dark blue skirt and a white button up shirt. Somehow, simultaneously, the shirt is too big for her, and the skirt too short. “We provide the children with uniforms so that they will be guaranteed suitable clothing,” says the pamphlet explaining what the Green Harbor Heights Family Home is and how it operates. District Four is so big that there are multiple Family Homes, and they have their own school programs, but in smaller districts there are few or even just one Family Home and the kids there go to regular schools. Maybe it’s for the better, Frances thinks, that she isn’t going to a regular school anymore. If they’d all just say she’s bad because she’s in a Family Home now, she’s better off away from all of that. Maybe the people here will get it, and they won’t act like they can’t even stand the sight of her.

Her first class on her first day of school is Panem History. The fact that she’s a new student isn’t even announced, and Frances wonders if kids just come in and out of here so often it’s not considered something worth remarking upon. The textbooks are old with cracking spines, and many of the kids in the class clearly aren’t even paying attention once roll call is over (many of the students seem to be cutting class- there are many, many rules at the Home. But the Home is big enough that there seems to be a lot of rule breaking, such as skipping class, all the same.)

Frances is trying to pay attention, but sometimes it’s hard, given how much she has to think about. Do all the teachers know everything about her family? If they do, she can’t assume they’ll like her that much. They’ve probably already decided what they think about her in that case.

“Ma’am?” the tall, dark-complexioned girl sitting next to Frances raises her hand. Frances thinks she might be about a whole head shorter than this girl. Annie, she called herself when the teacher called out _Ani Cresta?_ And she’d just said, as if bored beyond words, as if she’d said it a thousand times before, just call me Annie. Annie’s tone towards the teacher sounds almost annoyed. 

“Yes, Annie,” the teacher says wearily. Frances recognizes that tone. When you haven’t done anything wrong yet but people are just waiting for you to do whatever it is they’re expecting of you, whatever it is they don’t like about you.

“You said Panem is all that remains of the known world. But in District Four we have the best ships in the whole country. There haven’t been any expeditions to see if any other countries still remain. So how do we really know there isn’t anything left?” Annie says, her voice intense like a television lawyer. She’s scraping her nails vacantly up and down the cover of her unopened textbook. Frances can’t look away from her – she’s never heard anyone talk like that before. Of course, she never wants to leave District Four. There’s nothing else she knows. But the idea that there might be more places in the world is such an overwhelming possibility she doesn’t even know what to think other than that Annie must have many more thoughts worth hearing. Annie is really pretty, Frances thinks, with her clear sand-brown skin and oval face. No one’s ever said Frances is pretty. If she is, it’s in the _bad_ way, the _trashy_ way, the way that gives men ideas. After all, she thinks with dark humor, isn’t she a bad girl now?

The teacher looks stunned, and doesn’t say anything for a long time, just has her pointer stuck in the air and her mouth slightly open. “There just isn’t,” the teacher says faintly, almost nervously, and then with more authority, “the official government reports say so. We covered that in earlier lessons, if you were paying attention, Miss Cresta.” Annie nods her head as if considering that, her long waves of dark hair shaking.

The teacher continues on in the lesson for about five minutes until Frances sees Annie grasp her head like she has a headache. And then Annie gets up, walks a few feet away from her desk towards the window, draws back her arm, both her uniform shirt sleeves already rolled up as if in preparation, and clenches her fist and slams it against the glass until it cracks like a broken bone.

“Shit,” breathes a girl, while a boy laughs approvingly and says something about _Crazy Cresta at it again_. Annie turns back from the window and seems to notice Frances for the first time. Frances is trying not to smile because the teacher will see her, so she covers her mouth as if in shock, but her eyes must say it all, because Annie laughs as if sharing a joke with her, and then starts to walk forward.

“You know the drill, Miss Cresta. Front office,” the teacher says, shaking her head. Annie waves goodbye to the class like a performer leaving the stage – she seems to be some kind of legend in the Family Home- but keeps her large eyes looking straight at Frances, and Frances has never been more fascinated by another person in her life.

_

Physical Education lessons involve the Family Home students getting on a short bus ride down to the beach. Like the uniforms, the girls are all issued standard blue one-piece swimsuits (the boys have separate Physical Education classes). Because she doesn’t know anybody, and because she has a good feeling about Annie, this is exactly who she decides to sit next to on the bus ride. Annie also has nobody else sitting next to her, even though everyone else seems to be joined up together in pairs or groups. Frances wonder if this means Annie doesn’t have any friends or no one likes her- by the reaction to her hitting the window, it seemed as though people didn’t dislike her- or if she just prefers to be alone, which occurs to her too late, because she’s already sat down without asking.

“Hi there, new girl,” Annie says, sticking up one hand and waving her fingers as she sprawls against the bus window.

She smiles, feeling a bit shy. She feels like she’s been hiding her whole life, and wonders if Annie can see that. “Hi,” she says, maybe a bit too enthusiastically. “I’m Frances. I…I’ve never been in a Home before,” she confesses. “I don’t really know anyone yet. But I thought you seemed like someone I would want to know,” she tells Annie, hoping she doesn’t sound too strange.

“Do you feel lonely?” Annie asks. She sounds genuine, and not like the Family Home people or the Family Department people who came to check in on her and her mom, or her and her grandmother. She sounds like she’s just a girl asking someone else her age. Frances can’t remember ever being talked to so normally.

“Yeah,” she says softly. “I do.” And it really makes her sad, she realizes, not for the first time. Sometimes she feels like she’s supposed to be all alone, and everything that happens to her is proof of it, evidence she’s supposed to take as messages. _No one wants you and even if they did, it doesn’t matter, you don’t belong._

“Sometimes I feel lonely too,” Annie says, and sighs. “Come on. Don’t look so upset. We’re going swimming. I’ll be your exercise partner,” she says, “you don’t have one, do you?” she asks understandingly.

Frances shakes her head, not having known much about how lessons here are structured in the first place anyway. As if reading her mind, Annie leans in closer to her. “You get used to how it is here pretty fast. I mean, at least, you learn how it is fast enough.” Frances gives her a small smile.

“Yeah,” Annie says, “you can do it.” Frances isn’t so sure, and she doesn’t see why Annie should be so sure, either. But it’s nice of her, and Frances isn’t going to turn away kindness from someone she thinks she likes, and who might like her back. That’s a rare treasure, for girls like her, who the world has decided are bad. But if she’s bad, then at least, if she isn’t alone it might not have to feel so bad all the time.

_

If Annie is unhappy, distant, and disruptive during regular classes at the Home, she’s the opposite when they get to swim. When Annie swims she looks powerful, Frances thinks, like nothing could ever stop her. Like the rest of the world can’t reach her as long as she’s submerged in water, floating on her back peacefully, her eyes closed and her face calm and still; swimming quickly, her arms moving forcefully; treading water effortlessly and staying in one place serene as a star in the sky.

It’s not surprising that she’s so good at it- everyone from District Four learns swimming early, but Annie, Frances thinks, has a special talent at it. Sometimes they don’t even talk during swimming, Annie gets so into it, but it’s not like they ignore each other, just that they can do it together without talking.

Frances likes to go underwater. To test how long she can hold her breath. To see the fish and rocks and shells and different kinds of sand beneath the surface. None of the sounds from the world are that audible in the ocean. Underwater, there’s no one to tell her what to do. She can do whatever she wants as long as she’s under the surface.

Annie and Frances, one day, swim laps to and from the raft a few yards into the water. Annie is quicker, but Frances can go for longer distances underwater. If you put them together, they’d be like a sailfish, Frances supposes, the fastest fish in the sea.

Annie’s hand hits the wood of the raft and Frances propels herself upwards to touch it also, taking a moment to catch her breath. “Why don’t you go by your given name?” Frances asks, hoping she isn’t being offensive, but just wanting to know more about Annie, whose government name is Ani.

Annie looks behind her to see if any other kids are on their way to crash into them, as they stay in place by the raft. “Ani was my mother’s name. I was named after her and when I was younger it was just easier for us to not be called by the same name,” she says, smiling sadly.

“I’m sorry,” Frances says, wondering if she shouldn’t have brought it up, thinking she probably should have known better.

“Nothing you have to apologize about. But thanks,” Annie tells her, her strong arms unwavering as she holds onto the raft. “And anyway,” she adds, sounding a little downcast. “You’re here too. If you’re sorry then so am I.”

“I can tell you about it later. If you want,” Frances says under her breath. She doesn’t really talk about her life around the other kids; she doesn’t want them to know even if rationally she understands that many of them must come from similar lives. She already had to talk to the people running the Family Home when they admitted her. It felt wrong telling them, like they were forcing information out of her but also like she was telling them her family’s business, that she had no right to tell others. Because they didn’t understand. How could they? Aunt Mara was right. Their whole job was to take girls like her and reform them until there was nothing left of her family, nothing left that could end up like her mother or father, even the good parts. Turn her from someone no one wants into someone people would want. They would have no idea what it would like to be someone no one could ever really want. And so she doesn’t tell the other kids about her life, because for all she knows, they wouldn’t want her either.

Maybe Annie does, though. She thinks Annie likes having her around.

“Of course you can tell me,” Annie tells her. Her smile is small but as deep as the ocean. Frances knows she can trust her, maybe more than she trusts herself.

_

When no one is listening, they tell each other about their families. Annie says her mother and father both died. She’s an orphan, like some of the others here, her parents died a couple years ago. A boating accident caused by a storm. But Annie used to be in another Family Home before this one. They moved her, though. It was one of the smaller ones. (Frances is starting to think the Home they’re in isn’t one of the “better” ones.)

Frances tells Annie about her own family. How she’s not like some of the kids here because it’s not just that she has family who can’t take care of her, it’s that she has family who don’t want her. That she’s never known her father, and doesn’t even know if he’s alive or dead. That her grandmother is probably going to live the rest of her life in a shitty hospital wing. That her uncle either never noticed when his wife would hit her and throw things at her and call her a slut and an idiot and an ungrateful bitch and say she’d end up just like her mother on the streets fucking for morphling, or he just didn’t care. And that she thinks she’s the only person in the world who cares about her mother and maybe if other people had cared about her she’d have gotten better, maybe she’d have never gotten this sick.

Frances’ eyes sting with hot tears as she says all of this to Annie, and she says that she wants to feel angry, but sometimes she just feels too sad to feel anything else.

Annie gives her a half smile. “It’s the same for me sometimes too,” she says. “But I don’t think people see.” And Frances realizes, clearer than ever, that no amount of staring and looking and analyzing and pointing someone out will automatically and inherently amount to understanding; a realization that will aid her, if not protect her, in her life ahead of her.

“Maybe no one should,” Frances says, “unless we want them to.”

Annie ponders that. “I think that’s a good idea,” she says, “and maybe we don’t want them to.” No, Frances thinks, I don’t want anyone to, only you.

_

On Reaping Day, Frances is not yet twelve, but Annie is. Frances is unable to sleep, thinking about Annie’s name being called.

Nobody in the Home really cares if the kids who aren’t the little ones stay within their bedrooms at night, just as long as they don’t leave the dormitory areas. That’s why the boys and girls are kept in separate buildings. So all Frances has to do is just leave her room, while her two roommates are reading a magazine together, and walk down the hall and knock on Annie’s door.

“Oh,” Annie says as soon as she sees her, quietly because her roommates are asleep. “Come in, Frances. Come on.” So she comes in and Annie guides her towards her bed.

“I’m really worried for you,” Frances says quietly. Annie smiles at her gently.

“I know,” she whispers. “Do you want to sleep next to me? I’ll be right by your side.” Frances looks over to see if Annie’s roommates are listening at all.

“I would,” Frances says and gets in bed next to Annie and wraps her arms around her as though holding on securely enough will protect her from the world. Frances worries she’ll have bad dreams, but the next morning, she’ll realize she hadn’t had any dreams at all.

Annie’s name isn’t called, and Frances stops listening after that. But she notices Annie can’t look away from the girl and boy who were chosen. She stares at them, almost completely unblinking, until they are taken off the stage, and then for a moment at the space where they had been standing as they stood in front of the whole world, offered up to Games.

_

For the first couple years of the kids being of Reaping age, the Family Home still keeps a close eye on them, almost as stringently as they do with the youngest. But there are so many, and the older kids usually are going to be in the Family Home until they reach adulthood. No one’s coming for them. Frances never had any illusions about that, at least, and she’s realized she doesn’t miss her uncle’s house. When she’s an adult she’ll be able to do what she wants. But for now, that she’s a Reaping age girl just over the age of being the youngest tributes’ ages, she’ll settle for doing what she wants as long as no one’s watching.

Frances feels nervous every year, and Annie tenses up every Reaping, with a strange wide look in her eye. But neither of them get called, and anyway, Frances supposes, with all the strong Career girls in Four, someone would probably volunteer in their place. They wouldn’t let their opportunity to be a Victor, Four’s opportunity for food for a year, get blown away by some younger kid who doesn’t have a chance. It’s not dying that Frances is really most nervous about, so much as the fact that she probably wouldn’t have a chance at all, she’d be hopeless against all of the horrible things that could await her in the arena. That’s really what she thinks, even if her Physical Education and Maritime Education teachers always give her good grades, and that surely would put her at an advantage at least over some of the other kids like the ones in Three who only know about computers and stuff like that in their schools. 

Some of the oldest girls can sneak their way, or at least get allowed into, some of the bars. Frances and Annie are still too young to be able to look old enough for that, but there are parties thrown off the Family Home property, outside of their jurisdiction. So there is a deal of going out at night illicitly. It’s not that the Family Home people don’t care, it’s just that there are so many kids at each individual Family Home that sometimes they don’t notice or they’re too busy. Besides, the Reaping age kids breaking the rules makes for a good morality tale to the youngest kids, to teach them how not to act once they reach that very important age bracket.

Girls who drink coat-hanger are whores and murderers, for example. That’s what the Family Home medics and teachers say to the kids who are just being taught about their bodies (although it’s not as if you can only learn about that from class, which is something Frances thinks the Family Home people seem to forget, or at least ignore). But Mags in the Victor’s Village does a lot of work – actual work, not Family Home stuff- for less well-off people in Four, and Frances has met her a few times, like the time Brine Tipperary won the Games last year and there was a huge celebration in the town square. A lot of girls go to Mags to get coat-hanger and Mags isn’t bad. Although, no one at the Family Home said Mags did it, maybe they like to pretend otherwise. Frances and Annie have never had to be in a situation where they had to drink it- Frances still thinks they’re both too young for any of that- but it’s good that they know someone trustworthy who could help them. Otherwise they’d probably be kicked out of the Family Home, on the streets, of Reaping age and with a kid on the way.

(That’s what happened to another girl, one of the older ones. All the other girls said one of the teachers had gotten her that way. Frances had never had any lessons with that teacher, and she was glad for it. She tried to keep away from him as much as possible anyway. She kept a further distance from most of the teachers after that, and said even less than she usually did to the people who worked at the Family Home, trusting them even less than before, but feeling like she had gained a better understanding of the place that was not her home.)

Girls who sneak out at night are up to no good, they also say. And maybe that’s true in its own way, Frances supposes. She is breaking the rules by sneaking out even when she’s doing nothing but go to the beach with Annie. The point is that good girls don’t go out at night alone. But, Frances thinks, that’s the flaw in their logic. The Family Home seeks to turn girls like her and Annie into good girls, which means, that’s not what they are, that’s not what they were when they came, and they only have a chance at being so once the Home is done with them.

Sometimes Frances and Annie go to parties, held on boats, on the beach, in the small and crowded houses of neighborhood kids who know Family Home kids, or their extended relatives. The radio plays fast and heavy music that Annie thrashes her head to, her hair waving all around in the air. The boys all tell Frances they’ll give her a seaweed beer if she kisses them, if she dances with them. They say they like the way she looks. She never does anything that would get her into too much trouble.

She doesn’t do it because she particularly likes any of the boys or wants a boyfriend. Every time she lets a boy kiss her with an open mouth or put his hand up the back of her shirt, she can hear the Family Home teachers, her aunt, even sometimes her uncle, in the back of her head, calling her a no-good street girl, a whore, a runaround. Maybe she is, if being that just means someone calling you that, which Frances is starting to think is how it works, that was always how it worked and she always knew deep down. Sometimes she doesn’t even know why she does it. But often in the back of her mind she feels satisfied. Because she made the decision, and no one else made it for her, even if the boy propositioned and she still has to go back to the Family Home, a place where everything is all about other people making decisions for her, in hopes that one day when she is out of there she’ll only make the decisions they told her to. Do what we say. Be quiet. You lucky trash girl. We’re going to hate you no matter what, you can at least try and live up to our standards.

And so Frances doesn’t think twice about climbing out of the common-room second-floor window in her and Annie’s dormitory and scaling down to the streets, where the two of them walk into town or to the beach.

Sometimes the music gets loud and a group of people at the party all get together close to the radio and push and slam against each other, like some combination of fighting and dancing, and sometimes Annie does it even though Frances tells her she could get hurt. “It’s not that bad, Frances,” Annie says, sounding so rational, her eyes drifting off dreamily like the thought of that wild, violent dancing is calming to her, “and I can leave, or just tell them to stop if gets dangerous. No one ever really gets hurt.” 

“But why do you do it?” Frances asks, confused, not judging her, just genuinely wanting to know.

Annie shrugs. “Honestly, I don’t know why I do a lot of the things I do,” she says, smiling. Frances believes her. She could say the same thing of herself, but maybe it wouldn’t be true, coming from her, she sometimes thinks. “I just do what comes to me.”

Sometimes Frances wishes she could be more like Annie, who does what she wants and says what she wants and doesn’t care about what other people think about her, doesn’t even seem to have her own harsh opinions of herself stopping her. Annie is brave, and free, and Frances doesn’t think she’s anything like her.

Sometimes when the boys kiss Frances and touch her and say she’s pretty, she pretends they’re Annie.

_

“There’s a world outside this,” Annie says, gesturing her hand away from the sand and over the water and towards the horizon, one day when they’re at the beach, not for Physical Education, but on a weekend for fun. It’s early summer, and there are even some Capitol tourists in town, but not on this beach; this beach is much too rocky and small for them to have much interest in. The steady waves ensure that no one on the shores or even on any passing boats can hear her, Frances realizes, that only the two of them can hear one another.

People say Annie is unusual, and sure, sometimes she does things that most people don’t do. Like the time she dove backwards off of the raft at the beach. Or the time at a party when some boy wouldn’t stop putting his hands all over Frances even when she kept saying stop, and she thought she was going to start crying, but then the guy just yelled out and she saw Annie had bit him on the arm so hard he was bleeding and he let go, and all Annie had said to him was, “I know you heard her.”

But she’s smart, which is what people forget about her. Or, as she put it, they don’t see. Smart enough to know things other people don’t, and smart enough to know how to talk about it and when to talk about it so that no one gets in any trouble. (“No one is going to listen to us,” Annie tried to reassure Frances once. “No one ever listens to us. No one cares about us.” Sure, Frances had thought, but the Peacekeepers would probably care if they heard some of the things we said, some of the things you said.) Sometimes Frances thinks people just say Annie is “crazy” because they don’t know what she’s talking about and don’t understand her.

“Like outside being in the Home and having to go to the Reaping every year?” Frances asks.

“Well,” Annie answers, leaning toward Frances, “sure. But also, I mean. There are other places in the world. Other countries.”

Francis doesn’t know what to say for a second, remembering that first class at the Home. “But they were all destroyed. There’s no one else,” she says, unhappily, but as facts are said.

“Maybe,” Annie says, as if she doesn’t really believe that, “but none of us really know. That’s just what they tell us. Notice how they barely tell us anything about other places besides Panem. Maybe the rest of the world is out there, and always was.” Frances isn’t entirely sure how the government could lie about that successfully for so long, but then again, there hasn’t been any uprisings, even minor protests, in almost a hundred years. That’s pretty successful, she supposes.

“Okay,” Frances says, “I guess.”

Annie pauses for a moment as if trying to figure out how to say what she’s thinking. “When my parents were alive, we had these encyclopedias. They were in another language and they were hidden. The plan was that if anyone ever found them, we would just say we didn’t know what they were. But they had been in my family since my grandparents came to Panem, when people could still come.” Annie’s words are more rapid with every sentence and Frances can’t stop listening, doesn’t know what she’d say if she was asked to say anything. “Anyway, my family knew the language and taught a lot to me, even if they couldn’t tell anyone else. They just kept a secret.” Annie smiles slightly. “And I know you’re good at keeping secrets.” Frances nods solemnly.

“So what’s the secret,” she whispers.

“I’m sure people in the Capitol know,” Annie continues. “Not everyone, not the average people there. But the President and other people in his circle, I’m sure they’re hiding whatever records there are.”

“About other countries?” Frances asks, starting to feel a little lost.

“Other countries and this one too,” Annie says, her voice so low she’s nearly whispering. “See, Frances, the books said there were countries with people all over the world. If you got on a boat right here and kept sailing you would hit land. You could go far enough and find other continents. But maybe they’re not just ash and dust. And they had names and people and history. And so did Panem before all of, all of this. Before it was like this. Before even the Dark Days.” Annie’s voice is so intense, her eyes so wide and unflinching, Frances wonders what Annie might do one day with her knowledge, and she truly worries for her, thinking about the possibilities.

“What did it say,” Frances whispers, so quietly she can barely hear herself but needing to know.

Annie’s large eyes shift, settling on Frances. “Hayastan,” she says. “That was where my family was from, a long time ago. That was where the name Ani came from. Where the books came from. In this country it had another name. They called it Armenia. But in its own language it was Hayastan. It’s surrounded by land, it’s not like here. It was a really old country. Your family- somewhere a long time ago they were probably from a place called Irrlandia.” Frances can hear herself breathing, she knows her mouth has dropped open just a bit. “The Games didn’t exist anywhere,” she whispers. “Not until here.”

“Did people…not hurt each other?” Frances asks, feeling ignorant and stupid, even though Annie isn’t talking to her that way, and she knows Annie would never think that of her.

“Oh, they did,” Annie says wearily. “They definitely did.” Frances nods, not surprised, having expected to hear that. Something flashes in her eyes like she remembered something. “Panem had neighbors. They were called, I don’t know, maybe they still are- Kanada and Meksika and instead of Districts there were states. Really. And there were so many of them. Panem lost a few of them. When I said you would reach land if you sailed far enough- there were islands and they were a state.”

“Why aren’t they part of Panem anymore?” Frances asks, looking all around her every few seconds to see if anyone is listening, but then, if they were, Frances and Annie would probably both be Avoxes by now.

“I don’t know,” Annie says, looking down to the water. “I wish I still had the encyclopedias but sometimes I worry I’d forget how to read them.” She sighs. “I wish I could ask my family,” she says, sinking down into the water and leaning her head back like she’s washing her hair in a basin. Frances gets down in the water to be on Annie’s level.

“I believe you,” Frances says. “I won’t tell anyone.” Annie smiles tiredly.

“I wish it didn’t have to be a secret,” she says. “But I guess if it has to be, I’m glad I can tell you.”

“Of course,” Frances says. “I think friends should always keep each other’s secrets.” A higher wave than usual comes and almost goes over both of their heads. “Do you want to go look for shells?” she asks and Annie comes along, swimming to the shore. 

_

Mrs. Sutter, one of the agents at the Family Home, is waiting in the office one day when Frances is called back inside the building, and has to leave behind a whole set of knots in Maritime Education class. She’s not too worried, because she’s been getting very good grades in that class and works on knots outside of class, too. She enjoys it. It’s something she’s good at, and she’d never really thought she was good at anything before.

Frances sits down in the chair across from Mrs. Sutter’s desk and waits to hear what she was called away from class for. “Good morning, ma’am,” she says tentatively.

“Now, Frances, before we begin,” Mrs. Sutter says, her head high and her tone almost disapproving (before “we” begin with…what? Frances wonders), “rest assured that there will be no big changes coming your way, we at the Home just thought it would be best for you to stay informed on matters regarding your family.”

“My family?” Frances asks before she can stop herself, suddenly being hardly able to focus on what to say or what not to, having difficulty staying where she is and wanting to stand up and get out of Mrs. Sutter’s gaze. “What happened?” There’s no way, she thinks, her uncle and aunt will be trying to get her back, not after all this time. She feels sick for a moment, and feels her heart race and her arms start shaking, as she thinks about the possibility that her mother has overdosed on morphling, and hates herself when she thinks, maybe Grandmother’s time has come, as if that would be a comforting thought.

Mrs. Sutter waves her hand. “Nothing really happened,” she says, as if trying to calm Frances, who is keeping her eyes as wide open and still as possible in hopes of keeping her expression controlled, even though she realizes that despite her mouth being tightly shut, her shoulders are rising and falling as she breathes rapidly. “Calm down, now, Frances,” she says, almost sounding worried. And so she tries, not because she’s told, not really, but because she doesn’t want Mrs. Sutter or anyone in charge of this place to get a sense of what’s going on underneath her surface. They already know enough about her. She can only imagine what they don’t say to her face, but still think of her. Her years here have given her a good idea about what sort of things they do think.

“Your mother,” Mrs. Sutter says the word as if she thinks Frances doesn’t quite understand its meaning, “has asked us if we would be able to relinquish custody to her. It seems she’s been in the hospital for a while, but has now been released and has been off morphling for a while now.” Frances bites her tongue, not caring how much it’s going to hurt later, because she knows she cannot say anything. There is nothing to say that she wants to say here.

The last time she saw her mother she was ten. She’d called the doctor crying because her mother’s eyes had closed but gone so strange when Frances pulled her eyelids open and she was barely breathing and it was like she was trapped in some kind of invisible bog, and the doctor wouldn’t let her come along and wouldn’t even answer when she kept asking “is my mom going to live?” and when the hospital called her uncle, he and her aunt wouldn’t even tell her for weeks her mother had survived an overdose of morphling. Her uncle had explained to her what morphling was as if she didn’t know and she’d wanted to scream at him _I know what it is! Every day the kids at school call me the morphling’s daughter! They tell me I don’t have a father but he could be half the men in Four! Mom explained to me what it is because she didn’t want me to be confused and she cried all the time telling me she wished she could stop but it was so hard to get off of it and she made me promise I’d never try it! And you’re mad at her and saying she couldn’t be a mother when her child needed her but I still needed her and what have you ever done for her? Nothing! So I don’t want anything from you or your wife who isn’t even related to me!_ But the authorities had placed her with her uncle all the same. They wouldn’t even let her stay with her grandmother who wasn’t yet living in the hospital wing.

In this moment, she really thinks she hates Mrs. Sutter. Because her mother might not be perfect, but who is Mrs. Sutter to judge her, judge Frances, when Mrs. Sutter and all her coworkers saw a man prey on one of the girls here, and then decided to kick the girl out into the streets, while the man saw nothing at all in his life change. Who is Mrs. Sutter to decide who is good, who is suitable, who belongs and who does not, Frances thinks. But that’s the problem- it’s her position to do exactly so. 

“Of course,” Mrs. Sutter continues, “we can’t allow that.” The condescension in her tone makes Frances wish she was as strong as Annie, makes her wish she was strong enough to fight back or at least say something in her defense, in her mother’s defense, without hurting herself somehow. Frances can never fight back, not really, because when she tries it only backfires. She doesn’t even try anymore. “There may be a time in the future when things may change,” Mrs. Sutter says, charitably but not with any real conviction, “but a significant period of time would have to pass. Possibly by the time you come of age, you will be able to…even things out with your mother.”

“Is that all,” Frances asks, realizing she sounds like she’s about to cry, hating herself and Mrs. Sutter and this whole Family Home. She’s not even going to get to talk to her mother, she realizes, not even going to get to hear exactly what her mother said.

“Yes, Frances,” Mrs. Sutter sounds, almost bored, and Frances realizes she probably is bored. She probably hears things like this every day. People like her and her family must be nearly interchangeable at this point. Like they’re nobody at all.

For a moment she considers asking Annie to run away with her, but realizes it would be pointless. They don’t have anywhere to go and they would just be put in another Family Home and they can’t really do what they want, live how they want, until they’re past Reaping Age, they have to get past that first. There is nothing she can do, she thinks, absolutely nothing in this world for her to do. And maybe, she thinks, that’s why Annie does some of the seemingly inexplicable and strange things she does. It’s what she does instead of feeling powerless and giving in. Frances hopes one day, maybe someday, she can be even a little like that.

Frances leaves Mrs. Sutter’s office without even being dismissed, as she’s supposed to, and stares at the ground all the way back as she makes her return to class.

She ties her knots, every last one of them, faster than everyone else, staring out past the schoolyard, down across the street, the smell of the ocean nearby, the seagulls screaming. She thinks of getting on a ship with Annie and sailing to Irrlandia, to any and every other secret place far, far away from here. 

_

On Reaping Day you’re supposed to get dressed up, but it’s not uncommon for Family Home kids to just wear their uniforms if they don’t have anything better suited for a formal occasion. Annie is wearing her hair loose, it’s grown so long down her back, and it shines so brightly that Frances can’t imagine people would look at anyone but Annie even though she’s wearing her uniform shirt, some seashell jewelry she made herself, and a seaglass-green skirt just above her knees she usually wears when they go out at night. She isn’t wearing any makeup even though most of the girls do once they get to a certain age.

Frances is wearing her uniform skirt, which is getting old and will probably have to be replaced soon, and a short-sleeved white blouse which doesn’t suffocate her skin too much in the July heat. Being stuck in a large crowd makes the extreme humidity even more difficult to bear. She used some of the light blue shadow from the corner store makeup palette she and Annie share (but Annie uses far less than she does). May as well, she thinks, especially if there might be parties to go to after the Reaping.

Eventually, the Capitol escort, Calpurnia Crystal, takes to the stage in her blue wig and voluminous dress. Frances doesn’t understand how she can wear all that in this kind of weather. “Hello everyone!” Calpurnia says, tilting her head and waving. “It’s so nice to be back in District Four, a place like no other. And an honor to be able to call the Reaping for the Sixty-Fifth Hunger Games!” The crowd applauds because everyone knows they’re supposed to, and because sometimes, Four wins. Sometimes it’s not a total loss.

“Now,” Calpurnia continues, “as always, the ladies will be called first. So, without further ado…” she saunters over to one of the glass vases and reaches in up to her forearm, her wrists jangling with colorful jeweled bracelets. Calpurnia takes her good time wiggling her fingers around before deciding on a piece of paper to take out, with she does with the slow precision of a fisherman testing whether or not he actually has something on the line. 

“Frances Mairead Odair!” she calls out happily, and as Annie grabs onto her arm, all Frances can think is that this just feels wrong, and one of the strong older girls should volunteer and be the girl tribute this year and go to the Capitol, because she was never meant to do anything important.

_

Annie is the one and only person she has who will come and say goodbye to her before she has to go on the train. Her grandmother isn’t well enough to leave the hospital, she and her father probably would not know each other if they met on the street, her uncle and aunt clearly don’t even think she has the slightest chance and apparently don’t care if she dies, and she isn’t so sure about all the details of the Family Home custody arrangement but she’s fairly certain her mother isn’t allowed to see her without their permission until she’s an adult and thinking about that makes her want to wreck every room in the Family Home with her bare hands and cry.

Frances is so shocked her mind didn’t even register the name of the boy tribute. It could have been any one of her classmates from the Home and she wasn’t even able to pay attention, she realizes, wondering if she can’t stop being such a zoned-out idiot, how she’ll ever manage to do television appearances, let alone last a minute in the arena, the way she has to soon. She just walked onstage, dazed, and realized the whole country knew who she was now.

When Annie comes, she does cry, almost immediately upon seeing her. She probably will die, she thinks, because fourteen year old girls never win, not even the ones from Four, especially not girls who aren’t particularly strong or talented or even smart. She’ll die and her mother will have to watch and maybe that will make her get sick again, and Annie will be all alone in the world. This is going to happen and you’re the one crying, you stupid, selfish bitch? she thinks to herself hatefully. Until she feels Annie’s calloused hands holding her face gently. “Hey,” Annie says. “If the arena has water, you’re all set. Just remember that.” She can feel herself shaking her head. Annie wraps her arms around her and Frances closes her eyes and pretends she isn’t in a room waiting to be escorted onto a train to the Capitol. “You’re coming back,” Annie says. “I know you can. You survive things. You can keep doing it. And Mags will be your mentor. She’ll make sure you know everything there is to know.”

“You’re my best friend, Annie,” Frances says after a moment of trying to calm down. “I love you.” Her arms are wrapped around Annie’s waist and she doesn’t ever want to let go but knows she has to. She hopes they won’t end up being pulled apart.

Frances sways back and forth just slightly as Annie’s strong embrace shifts. “And you’re my best friend and I love you too,” Annie says, “don’t ever forget that, Frances. Don’t ever forget what I told you. That I know you can come home.” We have no home, Frances almost says, but then realizes she’s talking about District Four itself. No matter if what Annie says is true or not, there is a place beyond the Family Home, and it’s their district that Frances has never left and doesn’t want to die far away from, not when it’s all she knows, even if she doesn’t belong anywhere. 

Having Annie hold her makes Frances feel safer. Less powerless. Annie is right about so many things, why can’t she be even a little right about her? Maybe she is. Maybe she does have a chance. There is a knock on the door, probably Calpurnia. “I’ll watch you all the way,” Annie says, and Frances smiles, even though anyone seeing her would think she’s out of her mind to do anything but collapse in despair.

-

Calpurnia’s shinily made-up face stares expectantly at Frances as she makes her way onto the train. “Well,” says Calpurnia, smiling widely. “Good afternoon, darling. I hope the train is to your liking. You must be…excited, to travel.” Frances nods, taking it all in. She’s never been outside the District before unless you count being in the ocean, sailing on the coast. No one can claim the ocean, not even the Capitol, but no one in Four says this. Everyone just knows. That’s how the ocean works.

“I have a question,” Frances says, “maybe you can answer it?” she smiles hopefully, trying to make a good impression. She’s not entirely sure what Calpurnia’s job consists of beyond announcing names, but there is a chance she can help Frances.

“Of course, dear,” Calpurnia says, not moving from her seat at the table, just gesturing at her to come forward. Right, Frances remembers, I’ll be one of the little-kid tributes.

“If I win, do I still have to live at the Family Home? I would still get to live in the Victor’s Village, right?” Calpurnia looks stricken, taken off guard, like Family Homes are forbidden topics. She wonders what they do in the Capitol, if they don’t have them, or if they just don’t talk about it.

After a moment, Calpurnia nods. “I’ve never seen a tribute from a District Four Family Home win,” she admits, trying to soften her voice so that it sounds less dooming to Frances, “but! All Victors get their own house in the Victor’s Village. Nothing would prevent you from that if you win.” Frances smiles, slowly, and satisfied, until she can feel her lips separating just slightly; her teeth must be barely showing, like a wildcat’s fangs.

“Thank you, Calpurnia,” Frances says, widening her eyes to soften the effect of her expression before, which must have made her looked like a crazed maniac. If she’s going to be watched by everyone in the country from now on, she’d better start being more conscious of how she looks, she supposes. She can’t just stay quiet and duck her head and hope no one notices her anymore. “Thank you very much.”

_

Mags Flanagan and Delmar Gutierrez will be the District Four mentors for this year; Mags will mentor Frances and Delmar will mentor the boy, Dune Chumak. Dune is sixteen and tall and definitely has a better chance at winning than Frances does. But, she supposes, it hasn’t even begun, and they won’t really know until it happens. She catches herself smiling thinking about it. That most people except the game makers and probably the President know as little as she does. Which, if it isn’t an advantage, doesn’t exactly doom her either.

The train ride to the Capitol is an overnight ride, and Frances can’t sleep. She makes her way out of her room and walks around until she finds the sort of sitting room where she and Dune and Calpurnia and Mags and Delmar had all met with each other first, and they had their schedules explained to them. She realizes it’s the middle of the night and Mags is alone at the table, awake as well, tying some knots.

Mags gives her a knowing smile, gesturing over for her to come to the table, which Frances does. Mags looks from side to side, still smiling, and puts her index finger over her mouth. “What happens in this room stays in this room,” she says.

Frances has seen pictures of Mags when she was younger, the age she won. Video clips too. She was so gorgeous, with voluminous red hair and full lips and wide, glimmering eyes. At her coronation ceremony she wore a clover-green mantle kept together with a golden pin, to match her crown. She still has the same eyes, that are full of knowledge, that are the eyes of someone Frances thinks she can trust.

She gets down next to Mags and works on a knot of her own. “Mags,” she says, “you didn’t win just by tying knots and making baskets.” It’s not a question. Frances looks up at Mags and hopes that she’ll learn something from her, that Mags’ efforts won’t be in vain.

Mags laughs, short and rolling. “You’re a clever girl,” she says.

Frances frowns. “Actually,” she says sadly, looking down at the table “I’m really not. I don’t want to disappoint you.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Frances,” Mags tells her. “I think you’ll be learning soon just how clever you can be. And besides. You’re not disappointing me. I’m never disappointed by any of my tributes. They always make me very proud.”

Frances realizes there’s no reason to pretend otherwise, and so she says what she’s thinking. “Even when they die?” she asks. “I want to go home. But someone like me can’t possibly win,” she says, feeling resigned to her situation but at the same time, wanting to live. She really doesn’t want to die. It’s not just fear, she thinks.

Mags is quiet for a long while, making her knots. “Your work is very good,” she tells Frances. “That will help you a great deal.” And then she puts her finger to Frances’ chin. “No one thought I would win either,” she confides. “But I got out of there all the same. I went home. And you’re right,” she says, something hardening in her eyes, something that Frances thinks might help her if she had any of it inside of her. She wonders if she does. She hopes she does, she realizes. “I certainly didn’t only win by weaving baskets. But we’ll get there,” Mags tells her, her voice gentle again. “Don’t you worry, dear. Right now you need to get some rest, because you’ll be very busy.”

Frances nods her head slowly. “I’m scared,” she says, so quietly she can barely hear herself, but Mags hears. Frances wonders what else Mags has heard over the years.

“That’s only natural, child,” Mags says, holding her hand. “Most tributes are afraid. Most Victors were afraid,” she says, almost sadly. “Perhaps the Victors especially. But I don’t mean to frighten you further. There is a lot to be afraid of. But that doesn’t mean you can’t deal with it.”

“What did you do when you were afraid,” Frances asks, feeling like this is a question she’s able to ask, no question about whether or not it’s allowed. Mags doesn’t seem like that, not at all. Frances hasn’t trusted an adult like this in a very long time, she realizes, maybe ever.

“Well,” Mags says, “I practiced everything before the arena, and in it, I always made sure of my surroundings. I took deep breaths and told myself not to panic. But I had a secret,” she says, smiling, and Frances can feel her eyes widening. “I called upon the saints and the gods and I prayed to them for guidance and deliverance and survival.” She doesn’t say this to Mags, but she’s fairly certain none of this is expressly allowed. Religion is not something approved of by the Capitol, and very little of it is taught in schools, aside from it existing as something that was once prevalent in this place that would become Panem, as well as the rest of the world.

Of course, there are still remnants here and there, just as everyone knows that when people say “what the hell” it has religious origins. In Four it is not uncommon for people with names like Frances Mairead Odair or Mags Flanagan to say things like “oh Brigid” when surprised or worried or grateful. There is not much talk of who Brigid is; some say she was a holy Saint and some say she was an ancient goddess and some say both. There are other things like that, where people seem to have differing records on, but agree that it could be both, or neither, and they may never know until they die, because there are no records available that they know of. They may very well exist somewhere. But they are not meant for people to have, lest they start believing too much in forces greater than the Capitol government.

Frances listens, not because she is allowed, but because she can. And Mags tells her of so much she never knew. How Patrick the Saint with his green robes and his staff traveled Eire, called Ireland, called Irrlandia, surviving abduction and performing miracles, driving all the snakes from the land, how Mags prayed he would intercede for her, and she thwarted the path of the neon snake mutts by trapping them in a tight net and drowning them. How in the dark of night, when she was in the final eight, she prayed to the Morrigna, the three war goddesses who appear in battlefields, as crows, as three sisters or one woman, how she prayed that she would be the one to make it out alive. Of Brigid, both the saint and the goddess; and how the new faith replaced the old faith, so long ago. Of the Magdala, who Mags was named for, called Apostle to the Apostles, follower of the Son of the Lord, holy and blessed, even as she was despised as a fallen woman and tormented by demons. She prayed, Mags did, both faiths, and she survived, not only because she prayed for it, but her prayers were answered all the same. “They will help you to be strong,” Mags says.

In the dark bedroom on the train, in the depth of night, Frances gets on her knees and prays. She prays to the saints and gods and thinks of battle and victory and protection and ancient things that are not gone, and for the first time in a very long while, feels at peace.

_

“What a pretty little thing you are!” trills one of the Capitol stylists in excitement.

“Really?” Frances asks, dubious about this assessment from the nice but strange woman from her prep team. People from the Capitol dress weird, maybe they have strange definitions of pretty, too. But maybe, since these people are stylists, they know what they’re talking about.

The neon-green lips of the stylist fall open in surprise, and maybe a bit of pity. “Of course, sweetheart!” she says, “haven’t you ever looked at yourself? By the time we make you up, every girl in the country will wish she was you.” Frances doubts that, given her circumstances, but doesn’t say anything. The woman smiles wistfully, and gestures for the main stylist to come over, a short, middle aged guy with sunrise-pink hair.

“She’s a star,” her stylist says, taking off his gold-plated sunglasses and letting them hang on his half-buttoned dress shirt. “Trust me, darling,” he says to her. “You won’t ever be insecure again. And hopefully you’ll have the confidence to tell anyone who doesn’t see how beautiful you are that they’re wrong.” He starts combing her hair, and wonders how she could possibly be beautiful in the arena, where she could be covered in dirt or mud, or sunburned or frostbitten. But then, people have thought other girls in the arena were pretty. They had sponsors giving them gifts and people betting on them and if they won they became famous. Like Mags, who was on the cover of every fashion magazine for years and years.

If Frances is pretty maybe she won’t die, she thinks, and tries to banish the thought from her head as soon as it enters. Her hair is styled, her body is waxed, makeup is applied to her face. It hardly feels real.

“So what do you think?” the woman with the green makeup says joyfully. “Oh, I think you look just lovely!”

Frances looks in the mirror and almost doesn’t recognize herself. She’s beautiful. It’s not that they’ve made her look like a completely different person or obscured everything about her with too much busy makeup. Not at all. She just never realized this was what she looked like before. “Thank you,” she says quietly, unable to look away from the mirror. Unable to stop wondering if everyone has always seen her this way, what it will mean for her if they see her this way now.

She and Dune are meant to share a chariot for the tribute parade. Her lips are painted seaweed green, and her hair is styled and kept in place over her shoulders to cover her bare torso. Dune is also shirtless, but it’s different for him, she thinks. They wear crowns that are supposed to look like they are spiked with shark teeth. “Don’t look so uncomfortable,” her prep team tells her in frustration, “don’t you want the Capitol to like you?” they ask in genuine concern for her odds and she keeps in mind that she must smile for this. It’s all she can do to not look down at herself throughout the parade, and it feels very strange when the District Four chariot gets a great deal of applause, and not just because she feels badly for Dune, that his prep team doesn’t think he’ll be very popular and she isn’t sure if much of the applause for him.

When Frances gets back to her room, she puts on a sweatshirt, even though it’s July. She feels very cold, and has a feeling she will not sleep well. But she doesn’t have to do this for much longer if she wants to live, and she does.

She wishes she could talk to Annie, and for the first time since she’s arrived at the Capitol, she has the time to think about how alone they both are.

_

She’s used to doing what people ask of her. In a way, doing it in the Capitol is almost easier than at Uncle Cormac and Aunt Mara’s house or at the Home. There, no one was ever satisfied with her. Here, at least they seem happy when she does what they ask, and when she guesses how to follow their lead, they talk to her as if she’s excelled. 

Frances certainly hopes she has.

For her interview, she wears a thin, shimmering satin dress made to look as though it’s made of fish scales. Not like any fish she’s ever seen, but fish if they were invented by the Capitol, all rich purples and gold-hued blue. Long, dangling earrings made of jewels of the same colors. Black pearls in her hair. It’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever worn, and she truly does mean it when she thanks her stylists for doing all of this for her. But it almost doesn’t feel real, and when it hits her that it is of course real, she can’t stop thinking about how she could buy the Family Home and hire a construction company to raze it to the ground if she used the money that paid for this outfit.

All the same, she walks like she was told by her prep team, like she’s modeling the outfit, as she makes her way onto Caesar Flickerman’s stage in front of his studio audience and the cameras broadcasting her to the whole country, even back in the old, staticky television in her uncle’s elderly neighbor’s cabin she remembers watching the news on for some holiday gathering while the adults talked about something she had no part in. Everyone can see her and everyone does see her. If she is to survive, she realizes, this is how. Not by hiding. She probably wouldn’t ever be able to be one of those tributes who win by pretending they’re not there. That may have been how she’s lived much of her life, but it’s never really worked for her before. It probably won’t start now.

“Thank you for having me on tonight, Caesar!” she says right as she comes into the spotlights, even before he’s said anything to her. “This has been such an experience, I hardly know what to say,” she says, looking at the audience, not letting herself look like she’s begging and pleading. But then, she wonders if they even know what that would look like.

Caesar Flickerman takes her hand and kisses it like she’s a princess and he’s her sworn warrior and she giggles because no one’s ever done such a gesture like that for her before. “Everyone,” he says to the crowd, “let’s give a warm welcome to this exquisite young lady, Frances Mairead Odair!”

Maybe it’s just because he told them to, but the whole audience seems to love her. She finds her hand below her throat in surprise, which she thinks might be able to work for her, as she raises her hand and begins to wave to them. She’s probably supposed to do that. They wouldn’t want her to ignore them, they probably wouldn’t like her if they thought she was doing that. If they thought she was acting like she was too good for them, if she wasn’t grateful for everything they were doing, maybe they wouldn’t help her at all in the arena, maybe, when the time came, they’d send a parachute with a very sharp harpoon with her name engraved on it to the closest tribute so they could spear her and send her back to District Four in a casket. So she acts like she loves them, or at least, how she thinks that would look, so that maybe they won’t hate her, so they won’t turn on her like a mob to a witch from one of Mags’ old stories. Please, she thinks silently, I’m good, I can be good for you. I’ll do what you want and I’ll be good at it and I will be thankful to you because I’ll have to be.

“So, Frances,” Caesar asks her, his bright-red hair shining in the spotlights like the fake blood used in a low budget district-produced movie. “You are enjoying your stay in the Capitol?” She smiles at him, and then looks toward the audience.

_(The Home system exists to protect girls like you from becoming like your mother_

_Follow the rules of the Home, it’s for your own good_

_You shouldn’t be so ungrateful, would you rather be on the streets)_

“Everyone here has been so welcoming and kind!” she says to the audience as if they personally welcomed her. It isn’t completely a lie, at least, she doesn’t think so. She’s telling them what they want to hear, which really isn’t as difficult as she may have thought it was.

“I’m going to let you in on a secret,” Caesar says indulgently. “I don’t think anyone here can help it. I believe you’ve taken the Capitol by storm with your unique charm.” On the screens, Frances watches herself put her hand over her mouth, laughing modestly, like she can hardly believe anyone would think that of her.

She really can’t.

Backstage, some of the other girls look at her with what she realizes is jealousy. She wants to tell them, please don’t feel that way. She wants to tell them they’re all much prettier than she is – after all Frances has all these elaborate clothes on to distract from the fact that surely, she can’t compare to any of them. That maybe the audience thinks she’s fun to watch but none of them will be betting on her. All the other girls – and the boys too, she knows very well- probably have better odds than she does. Little girls don’t win the Games.

Most of the other tributes probably have whole families at home waiting for them to return. Families who want them, who live with them. Who are legally allowed to see them.

Frances can’t let herself think like this or else she’ll die first, she realizes. Maybe all of that is true, but it’s not the only truth out there. Annie believes she can come home, and Annie is the smartest person she knows. And if Frances comes home then she has a chance of seeing her mother again. If Frances doesn’t die she’ll get to see Four again, and maybe she doesn’t have a real home but that doesn’t matter to her, in the Capitol waiting to fight to the death, because she has District Four. Yes, she realizes, that is her home. The ocean and the sands and the whole salt-scented world, all she’s ever really known, and if the country really is hiding a whole world from all the districts, then Frances doesn’t feel like complaining too much because she loves Four, and she has no desire to let someone stop her from going back and growing up and living long enough to have her own life where she belongs. Mags is mentoring her not just because it’s her job but because she believes in her, if she didn’t truly believe in her chances wouldn’t it be obvious? Yes. Mags told her to pray to the same gods and saints that she had when she was in the arena, the same gods and saints above who showed her the path to victory, the path home.

“Some dress,” Dune says to her, good naturedly, as he walks forward- his turn for an interview. “Check me out!” he says, laughing at the gaudy seashell-shaped cufflinks on his glittering sharkskin suit. Frances laughs, and tells him good luck.

She keeps her back straight, good posture, like they taught her at the Family Home, and does not look at anyone. Throughout the rest of the interviews she listens as hard as she can, not to make out what Caesar or the other tributes are saying, but to hear the reaction of the Capitol audiences. If their cheers and applause and _aww_ s are louder than they were for her. And as the final interviews end, Frances realizes that none of the other tributes inspired reactions quite so enthusiastic as that of the Capitol reaction to her. She can hear every breath, every heartbeat in her body right now, and she swears to herself that if she dies, she will not go down without bringing the kind of wrath and resistance that can only come from the kind of girl who was raised knowing inside she would never be good.

_

The night before the Games she prays to the gods and Saints. To the Magdala, to protect her mother. To Patrick, patron of Eire, for Mags. To the Stella-Maris, lady of the sea, for Annie.

And to the Morrigna, the phantom queen of war; for herself, that she may bring down her other tributes swiftly and surely, and go home alive, no matter what she must do.

_

As the platform raises her to the surface, Frances begins to see the surroundings. Water, she thinks, with a fierce satisfaction, oh thank you, thank you. Already she wants to rejoice. Not because she thinks she’s won already, but because she knows nothing in this life, by design, ever comes easy, and she feels like she’s had her own small victory, in being able to work with what she has.

Wetlands, she sees, thinking back to the lessons about other districts. No- more specifically, it’s a swamp. Which isn’t anything she’s used to, but it’s closer than a desert or a glacier, and even if the arena looked exactly like home, it wouldn’t be real, none of it would be and soon that would be evident, and it might even be harder to navigate because of its difference. This, she has lesser expectations about, she supposes. She tries to keep her face blank, save for a small hint of a smile. They always seem to like that. And they are watching, because even now, before the cannons have gone off, this is all televised.

She hopes Annie isn’t too afraid- Frances knows she’d be afraid if she had to watch Annie, even if she thinks Annie is smart enough to win. Like Beetee Latier from District Three who won by creating some technological device that electrocuted people. Although she thinks Annie would probably be a great fighter.

Frances got an unexpectedly high score from the game makers, but she managed to evade addressing direct combat in her interview. She thinks she could manage it, if she tried. In the right context, not a crowded bloodbath, not hand to hand against an eighteen year old boy. She thinks she could, not because she’s amazingly skilled but because deep inside she really wants to survive. And many of the tributes, deep down, have given up on themselves and do not believe they can win. That doesn’t help them at all.

Three, the announcer says. Frances looks at the grasses, the murky water with its bright algae, the trees with flaring trunks and foliage that falls down like a lady’s long hair. Two. One.

She jumps into the strangely warm water that comes up to her waist, rather than trying to jump toward the equally close earth. Dune gestures towards her, to come forward, and points to behind to Cornucopia – to wait there until after he and the other Careers are done, because she’s so young and small and the smaller kids never fare well. She nods at him, smiling. Of course she can do what he is asking. Are the cameras watching? She hopes. They must be. They’ll see, she thinks. She submerges herself under the water, seeing the other tributes’ legs in the darkness, and swims around them, getting up to breathe whenever she’s in a relatively clear area and getting underneath again. By the time she’s at the side of the Cornucopia, no one is there, either having fled to other places in the arena or busied themselves at the bloodbath, or, of course, died. She’s heard the cannons even underneath the water, which is good, it means being underwater won’t distract her. She waits alone behind the metal structure, picking up a fallen branch and observing it to see how well it could be whittled into a fishing rod, and nearby, she sees some vines she picks up for herself, too. A fishing net, she supposes, or some makeshift rope.

Frances looks up towards the sky, knowing that the cameras are watching her in the game makers’ room, even if the televisions are broadcasting more exciting scenes. She feels like she’s snuck out the window of her dormitory. She feels so very alive. And she raises her hand and waves to whoever may be watching her in the Capitol, just like she did on Caesar Flickerman’s show.

Before Dune and her other allies can come around, a parachute falls from the sky. A sponsor has given her a set of knives. She thinks of a movie she once saw, an older picture on the classic channel at her grandmother’s house when she was younger, a film about the life of a famous stage actress. Just like the woman in the movie, Frances blows a kiss to the cameras and laughs. And makes her way, armed and swimming steadily underwater, where no one above the water can see her through the green-and-brown surface, back to the mouth of the Cornucopia.

As she slowly raises her head from the water, she sees the boy from Eight standing with a bag of bread in his hand. If he turned around he would see the top of her head, her forehead, her eyes green like the algae surrounding her. But he doesn’t. And so she lunges upwards and wraps her arms around his neck and uses the biggest knife to gut him as she has gutted fish so many times before. The cannons go off, and she looks to Dune, waving him over as she takes the bread from the dead boy’s hand. “Here,” she says, offering the bag to him and the tributes from One and Two. “For our dinner later.” The boy from Two smiles.

“Where’d you get this girl, Dune?” he asks. His name is Martius, he’s tall and has black hair.

“The bottom of the ocean,” Frances says, smiling at him, wondering if Martius doesn’t think any of what she just did was her own idea.

Martius shrugs. “Fish girl’s a little crazy. I respect that,” he says, gesturing to Ermine and Amber, the boy and girl from One, Morgan, the girl from Two, and Dune. As if he’s the leader, she realizes. She follows him as all of them, the Career Pack, make their way to find a place for themselves.

_

“You’re so young,” Morgan tells her affectionately, her blonde braids caked with mud. Night has fallen, and the cannons have gone off. “I mean, you’re younger than my little sister. I can’t ever remember seeing a girl Career this young.” Morgan pauses after Amber shoots her a look and shakes her head. “I don’t mean that in a bad way of course,” Morgan says then.

Frances doesn’t tell (remind?) anyone that she technically isn’t a Career, just from a Career district. She didn’t volunteer, she didn’t ever think she would be in the Games, and though she’s lived a lifetime building skills that could help her, she hasn’t ever so much as been inside one of those Games academies. There’s only one in Four and it’s so far north, almost near Seven, she’s never been.

“Of course you didn’t. I know that,” Frances says as sweetly as she can manage. She puts a finger over her mouth, barely concealing laughter. “Shh.” She points toward Ermine, who has fallen asleep against one of the wide trees, with his mouth open, but Martius’ loud laughter is enough to wake him up.

“Dude, I was sleeping,” Ermine says, annoyed, and Martius laughs louder.

“ _Dude_ ,” Amber says, rolling her eyes, but smiling, “if we keep being this loud we’re all going to get killed by that giant from Five.” The boy from District Five scored a ten, and is over six feet tall. Frances hopes she doesn’t have to meet him.

“She has a point,” Dune says. “We don’t want to get ourselves in any trouble.”

I have been in trouble my whole life, Frances thinks.

But no one’s ever really needed to know what she thinks, and maybe it’s better that way, so instead she offers to be the first one to keep watch while everyone else sleeps, and they all agree.

When the cannons go off for the night, and the face of the boy from District Eight appears in the sky, a parachute falls, as if someone just remembered. She feels bad, but she hopes the boy from Eight had given up, that he didn’t have anyone at home. In a way she hopes he was like her. No one who was ever really meant for anything. But she knows that would be too easy to hope for, and if it was true, it wouldn’t undo that she killed him. Nothing ever will. That’s what she’s done and she just has to live with it.

“The other children aren’t any different from you,” Mags had told her. “It’s not easy to do what you’re going to have to do. But if you’re going to survive, you do it all the same,” she had said.

_Morrigna, dark queen. Make me strong._

The parachute has more bread for her, and a bottle of water. She makes sure everyone is asleep before she starts drinking and eating- between the six of them, the dinner of bread was not much, and the clear water they’ve found still didn’t taste right- and waves upwards, in acknowledgment and thanks.

_

When Frances catches a catfish using the stick, a long weed, and a hook fashioned from a piece of wood carved with one of her knives, she and the other Careers eat it together. A sponsor gives her a parachute with a fishing rod in it.

When she is told to go to sleep that night, because it’s Dune’s turn to keep guard, she tells him to be careful and that he can use her knives if he needs to. But when she wakes up, he’s dead, his hands full of his killer – white wildflowers that are apparently poisonous.

She puts a rock over each one of his eyes before the hovercraft picks him up, and a sponsor from Four, touched by her makeshift tribute to this boy she barely knew, this boy who everyone expected to go further, certainly further than her, gives her a parachute with antibacterial medicine in it. Just in case she may need to help herself further on.

She keeps her knives very close. Her allies from One and Two are good, and she likes them, but they can’t all be allies for long. They all know that. And they must think she would be the likely first to go among them, the smallest and youngest and weakest.

She keeps her knives very close, for hunting, for combat, for being able to cut herself out of a trap. And, from what she learned as a child in her regular school, from what she learned in Maritime Education, from what Mags taught her, she puts it all together in her mind and at night when it is her turn to keep watch she starts making nets out of the vines that grow up and down the trees like cobwebs.

Her knives sharpen very well against the rocks in the swamp water.

_

In the morning she bathes herself in some of the cleaner water because her head and face and skin itch from all the dirt she’s caked in. Given all the mud that’s slid under her clothes, she decides to wash them in the water too. In the reflection of the water afterwards, she looks almost clean, with her water-slick hair and cleared face and washed-out clothes she managed to half-dry on the rocks. 

Four parachutes in succession fall down, and she can’t remember in all her years of watching the Games a time when a tribute got multiple gifts at once.

They were televising all of that, she realizes, not entirely surprised, but still, not at ease, not at all. She wonders if the people at the Family Home wish Dune were still alive instead of her. But she can wonder about that afterwards, if she makes it out alive, she supposes, so she gives gestures of happiness and thanks to the cameras as she opens her new gifts. One of them, she sees in shock, is a shining trident, the biggest weapon she’s ever seen, almost as tall as she is, but it feels light and natural in her hands as the knives.

She starts walking around the arena and setting traps, marking them with pieces of bark only she would know to look for, for reference. If she doesn’t get to the trap in time, she supposes, someone else will and take care of whoever’s in there for her. She spends the day doing it. And she never comes back to the Career base.

_

When the alligator mutts come, it’s a few days after she ran from her allies in the dead of night. That was almost a week since the Games began, and she supposes they were either going to kill her or abandon her, because they were looking at her with suspicion. She killed more tributes than they did. Even the boy from Five who they were all suspicious of. Without telling any of the others, she’d set a trap near their camp. The boy had gotten caught in it, and Frances had killed him before any of the others could, and they’d seen her do it.

And she was also getting much, much more sponsors than they were. The last part she feels self conscious about. No one’s ever given her that much at once, saying thank you almost feels inadequate. If she survives, how can she ever repay them? People like her don’t just get handed things. It’s not like she ever asked for it. It’s not as if she thinks she’s more deserving or better than Amber and Ermine and Morgan and Martius.

If they were all Victors and mentors instead of tributes, they’d all possibly be friends the way Mags gets along with everyone.

She’s thinking about this when she hears a raw scream, a boy. Not so far away from her, and she runs in the direction of the sound, wondering if someone has been caught in her trap. She sees the water, rippling like people are swimming in it, and then she sees the scales, dark green like palm leaves. Alligators, she realizes when one lifts half its head from the water, parting the lighter green algae he was swimming through. Alligator mutts with unnatural teeth almost as long as fingers. She stares, transfixed, thinking about how she’d never seen an alligator in person before, and how the real ones must be as awe-inspiring as these creations.

More screaming. By the water, against one of the trees, she sees Ermine, his legs caught in the trap as the alligators slowly advance. They don’t see her, and neither does he. Good, she thinks. She wouldn’t want him to see her. She wouldn’t want him to think she’s enjoying this. But she can’t look away, and she realizes it’s best that she doesn’t. Then, after, it occurs to her to be grateful for the fact that the mutts haven’t noticed her. She smiles to herself, thinking about it, and hopes the cameras don’t construe that as unhinged sadism.

She hopes she _isn’t_ an unhinged sadist.

The alligators drag Ermine into the water, and she can almost hear him screaming even after his head goes under. It takes a few minutes for the cannons to go off, a few minutes that feel like a few thousand years. She didn’t think it would take so long.

A parachute sends her a vest made of body armor. She swims around the Cornucopia as a workout, her head underwater, so the cameras don’t see her cry.

_

She’s walking down a path in one of the more wooded areas when she hears footsteps. She stops just to make sure she knows what she’s hearing and she hears bitter laughter. “Don’t bother hiding,” says a girl’s voice. Amber. “I’m not afraid of you. Come out, come out,” Amber says hatefully, her voice shaking in rage. “You must be scared of me. You must have been pretty scared of Ermine, huh?”

I’m so sorry, she wants to say, I am so sorry, if those mutts weren’t there I would have faced him, I would have done it quickly, I’m so sorry-

But as soon as she turns around Amber charges towards her, running with her dagger raised. The blade is stained the red-brown color of blood that has been dry for a good while. “It was _your_ trap! I know it was you, you creepy little girl! Tying people up like some kind of spider, running away because you’re so weak and afraid!” she yells, and Frances just looks at her, not bothering to deny it, holding her knife in one hand and her trident in the other. Amber jumps forward, tackling her toward the ground so far, her trident gets knocked out of her hand, and Frances flinches.

“That’s right,” Amber says, nodding her head as she pins Frances down, her face going pale, her dagger above her head. “That’s right. You can’t hide.” Amber isn’t attacking her. She’s holding her dagger weakly, and her arm is falling forward and the dagger’s point lands in the soft ground, and Frances realizes she’s still gripping her shortest, but very sharp, knife like it’s attached to her hand, and it’s gone right under Amber’s heart, she’d landed on it when she’d tackled Frances. Amber’s hand loses its grip on the dagger and she slumps forward, her rasping breath like gusts of humidity against Frances’ face. “You couldn’t hide forever,” Amber says, blood dripping from her mouth and onto Frances’ face, salty and warm like seawater in summer, dying, and the cannons go off for her.

_

After that, she tries to stay in close enough range to her nets to be able to arrive sooner.

Every time, the parachutes come down for her even before the cannons go off.

_

While she’s fishing, the boy from Nine lunges at her with some kind of chain. The two of them thrash around in the water so ferociously, and he yanks at her hair and tries to pull her underneath and she claws at his hands in hopes he’ll let go, and all she can hear is the splashing and she has no idea what’s really happening until she manages to push the boy backwards by shoving her knees into his stomach to hold him down, pinning her knees against his shoulders as his arms reach upward at her. It’s a good thing he’s so small, she thinks. Otherwise…

Frances manages to hold her trident to his face so if he tries to move upwards, he’ll get speared. She holds him down under two feet of water until he stops struggling, until the cannons go off.

She loses her fishing pole. But a parachute sends her a new one.

_

It comes down to her and Martius, but she doesn’t know where Martius is. She looks around the arena for hours, but she doesn’t find him. And she’s watched the Games. When it gets to the end, something happens to draw the last remaining tributes together. A sandstorm in the desert arena one year, sending the final four running to the Cornucopia to fight one another.

Frances returns to her spot by the clearest waters to think about it and get a drink of water, when the parachute falls. The note isn’t signed from Mags or Delmar (if she makes it out alive she wants to tell him she’s sorry Dune didn’t make it), or with any full names like some of her Capitol sponsors had given her.

“For a most lovely Victor,” says the note, “signed, an admirer.” She stares at it in confusion. Surely people in the Capitol must be mistaken, or at least this one person has to have missed something. Or, she figures, more likely he just bet a lot of money on her and refuses to acknowledge the possibility he’ll lose any of it.

She realizes this isn’t exactly the case when she opens the package and sees a necklace, a silver chain with a pendant of black diamonds and garnets forming a black widow spider, and her mouth drops open when she remembers what Amber had called her- what the whole country had heard her say. Nothing happened, she understands, because the people in the Capitol were just waiting for her to check in on her traps. They had been watching raptly, seeing her run around while Martius, to her ignorance, could not.

She makes sure to remember to smile and whisper her thanks so that the cameras can see before she runs to check her three remaining traps.

She only makes it to the second one.

_

Martius looks like he’s been waiting for her, trapped up to his waist in the net, one of his hands waving away a mosquito. He doesn’t even look angry. “Hey,” he says to her. “So it was you all along.” He must mean the nets.

“Yeah,” Frances realizes she’s whispering, as if they’re having a private conversation, when of course the whole country is watching them. “It was.”

“I mean, it was kind of obvious it was you, especially because of the boy from Five. It’s just good at least to know for sure,” he says, much calmer than he probably should be given that he knows he’s about to die, and Frances wonders if part of being a Career like he is, is as much about learning to die as it is about learning to kill. “Amber kind of went off the deep end with the paranoia when Ermine died. She thought you had this detailed plan you’d been weaving since the parade to get us all one by one. Me and Morgan had to calm her down so she wouldn’t do anything too…reckless.”

“Amber tried to kill me,” Frances says, informing him in case he didn’t know. But really, she supposes, Amber could have gone a lot further off the deep end. She doesn’t bother to explain to Martius how it happened because it would probably sound like she was trying to absolve herself of the responsibility of killing Amber, when she would have done it on purpose if she’d been given a few more moments.

“Yeah,” Martius exhales. “She and Ermine were really close. Like brother and sister. They had gone to school with each other since they were little. When she figured out it had to have been your net, she…she told us she didn’t want to just kill you, she wanted to cut off your nose so your sponsors would leave you to die of starvation and infection.” He says this with some guilt. In later years, on bad days, Frances will sometimes feel desperately enraged toward Amber, for not just doing that to her instead of trying to kill her. “That was after, you know, she had calmed down enough for us to understand what she was saying. She took it really hard. We tried to calm her down, really.”

Frances nods her head in understanding, knowing too well that this arena can alter who people are. “Did I kill Morgan?” she asks, genuinely wanting to know, hating how childish her voice sounds, almost like she’s begging to be told no, you didn’t do anything wrong.

“No, actually,” Martius says, sighing. Frances exhales in relief. Morgan had been nice to her and for no reason. On the first night, when the mosquitoes had come out and they couldn’t light a fire to drive them away because it would get the other tributes’ attention, Morgan had whispered to her, her eyes gentle, while everyone else was asleep to not be afraid, if they were carrying diseases it would have been obvious by now. Frances wouldn’t have wanted to be the reason Morgan died. “She was fishing in the water yesterday and the boy from Three tossed some electrical thing in next to her so she’d get electrocuted. I killed him though.”

“Oh,” she answers.

“Crazy world,” Martius says, shrugging. “Also I should tell you...since you’re going to be the Victor you deserve to know. I knew those flowers were poison. The ones Dune ate. They grow in Two. I didn’t tell anyone about them. I didn’t actually think anyone would eat them but…I’m sure you didn’t think a herd of alligators would get to Ermine before you did,” he says, and Frances wonders if maybe she would be as calm as he is if their places were reversed, because in a way, she thinks they are very similar.

Martius is still gripping his hammer, which has dried bloodstains on it. She wonders how long he’d been holding on to it. Instead of trying for one last shot of getting out of here and hurling it at her head, he uses his remaining strength to throw it to the waters next to him. “May you live in honor,” he tells her with such sincerity it touches her. She doesn’t deserve it. She certainly hasn’t lived in honor even if you only count the Games. It’s probably a District Two saying. Maybe she’ll learn about it when she goes on her Victory Tour. “Just one thing,” he says, smiling.

“Sure,” she says, walking closer to him, holding her trident like a scepter the way she saw drawings of kings and queens from before the Dark Days in her textbooks.

“Just make it quick, fish girl,” he says, something like pride and wistfulness in his voice.

Sometimes she fears she might do unspeakable, horrible things if she wasn’t so used to doing what people tell her to.

_

Her first night back in the Capitol she can’t sleep. Which is what she’s supposed to be doing, catching up on sleep and getting rest before all the ceremonies and celebrations in the Capitol. She’d lost track of how many times her stylist and prep team used the term “beauty rest” while lecturing her about what creams to put under her eyes before sleeping, how not to wear her hair while she’s in bed.

She finds her way to where Mags is staying and knocks on the door. Mags comes as if she’s expected her. “I-” Frances can’t get any words out before she starts crying, falling to her knees, and Mags, who must weigh less than she does, reaches to help her up like it’s nothing. Her eyes are half closed as Mags calmly leads her to the bedroom, and tells her to get under the covers. “Okay,” she says, because Mags must know what she’s talking about, “okay, Mags.”

For a while Mags just lets her cry, and her wrinkled, rough hand holds hers steadily, even though she can feel her own hand shaking. When she can, she starts to talk, but her voice is wavering and small. “I prayed,” she tells Mags, “just like you taught me.” She uses her other hand to wipe away the tear running down the side of her face so slowly it itches. “Would you mind telling me more about all of that sometime?” she asks, her voice tapering into a whisper.

“I would love to,” Mags tells her. “Don’t you worry about me minding.”

“Is Delmar doing all right? I’m sorry. I understand if he’s not happy and I wouldn’t hold it against him-”

“Shh,” Mags says, correctly sensing Frances is about to start crying uncontrollably again. “Delmar is just in the next room and we can see him tomorrow if you want. He’ll be happy to see you. You’re both going to be able to get to know each other now, just as all the other Victors from the same District do. Like a family. We don’t hold surviving against each other.” Frances doesn’t ask if it’s normal for her to hold surviving against herself. She just nods her head.

“Does everyone hate me,” she asks, thinking it has to be a possibility despite all of her gifts. Maybe that was just a few bettors, the kind of gamblers who somehow always have the winning bets. Even that one bettor who gave her the pretty necklace was right, she is like a black widow, a spider, like what Amber said, a creepy little girl who’s too afraid to face what she does, but does horrible things anyway, who hides.

Mags almost hesitates to answer, which almost confirms Frances’ suspicion, especially because the television isn’t on, until she does answer. “No,” she says firmly, “many people were happy about your Victory and in fact your Games were the most watched on record.” That doesn’t mean it was because they like me, she thinks. “And…you’ve become a sort of style icon in the Capitol. Everyone is looking forward to seeing you on television, on your Victory Tour, seeing what your talent will be, seeing all the things you’ll be wearing in the future…things like that,” Mags explains this as if she’s a doctor explaining side effects of a disease.

“But you make it sound…” Frances shakes her head as if to say no, whispering, hoping no one is listening. Mags strokes her hair.

“We can talk about it later,” Mags says. That sounds good. Frances doesn’t feel much like talking right now.

“All right,” Frances says. “Maybe tomorrow. I’m tired.”

“I know you are,” Mags says, “I was, too.” Frances lies down on her side, looking at Mags. “Please don’t leave,” she says quietly.

“I wasn’t going to,” Mags tells her, brushing her hair from out of her face. It’s the last thing Frances can remember before she falls asleep.

She dreams she sees Badb Catha of the Morrigna, washing the weapons of the tributes she killed in the green-and-brown water of the swamp. In the dream Frances is in the swamp. She doesn’t want to come out. She closes her eyes and lets herself sink underwater.

_

Frances is worried she’ll collapse the way people supposedly faint when they’re surprised or overwhelmed as she is led out before the whole world to be crowned the Victor of the Hunger Games. Her prep team had spent hours on her, making her face glitter so that she would shine in the sun like a crystal, and her hair wave like she’d been in water, and dressed her in a nearly transparent tulle dress covered in pink pearls, pink seashells, pink diamonds. It’s beautiful, the kind of thing an adult would wear. So maybe that’s how they’re marketing her, as all Victors are sort of. A mature young lady from Four. A possible fashion icon. A Victor who made the world love her.

_(For a most lovely Victor_

_Keep acting up and you’ll end up like your mother the morphling whore_

_Pretty little thing you are)_

The audience roars for her. Only slightly more when the President comes on, and she certainly never in her life had thought she would ever end up in the same twenty-foot range as him. He approaches, and slowly puts the circlet on her head, his eyes observing her with a strangely cold intelligence. There is a strange smell, which she thinks might be his cologne given the odd trends in the Capitol. But she knows what blood smells like, and that is part of it, and her mouth involuntarily parts in surprise. As soon as she does she knows she must speak.

“It is an honor to meet you, President Snow,” she says with quiet deference. He smiles then, closed mouth, almost amused. Perhaps she has done something right, or they are just at such different points in their lives that he sees her as a child playing dress-up, not at all as fearsome as the newscasters would have her, not as stunning as the magazines say she is. Just another district kid, just another year.

“Congratulations, Miss Odair,” the President says to her, and she knows deep in her bones that she’s right. That no matter what anyone else here thinks, the man who runs this city, runs her district and every other place in this country, sees her as little more than another name on a list. She is not offended. He is the President and she is a district girl, what else would he think of her. But, she tells herself, it is good to know.

She does wonder about the blood, though, even as she smiles wide and waves to the crowd, reminding herself to act like every last person in it personally put the crown on her head. 

_

“Everyone welcome the femme fatale from Four, Frances Odair!” shouts Caesar Flickerman as she walks onto the stage, and something about his voice has an almost forceful roar to it that she hadn’t noticed before. Straight posture, slinky walk. Just like she was told. Wave to the crowd and smile at them, because really, if they hadn’t enjoyed her so much, she may not be standing here, she’d be ashes put to rest off the coast of Four. It is not so hard, she tells herself, not so hard as the arena. And so she gives them a glimpse of what they see her as. It is what she has been doing her whole life, in a way.

Frances walks slowly, to show her outfit, in blue high heels that do not quite match- her stylists had told her that having one heel be slightly higher than the other would give her a special walk that would add to her glamour, which she wasn’t so sure about at first, but she can put one foot in front of the other all right. Her eyelids are a shining blue, her lips a golden bronze, her skin shining with glimmering foundation and highlighter, her hair enhanced by glittering extensions that reach her waist. Her earrings are two little tridents. Her dress is a nearly-transparent silk chiffon, the fabric like a watercolor painting, the colors of the sea during a storm.

Caesar bends over slightly and reaches out his hand and she already knows to reach out her arm from a distance, half coquette and half killer, for him to hiss her hand.

“You are always such a wonderful host, Caesar,” she says, and the crowd applauds. “They’re so nice to me,” she says to him, like a private confession, “I can hardly believe it!”

“I think they like you,” he says, winking at the cameras. The strange thing is, it seems they do. She puts a hand to her hair, self consciously. It really isn’t all an act.

“I think you do,” she says to the crowd. “And I am so, so thankful to you all.” Someone from the audience calls for her to show her dress off, which gets a lot of applause, and so she gets up and lets them see it from all the different angles.

“I’d say you have a very robust career in modeling ahead of you,” Caesar says, pointing his finger towards the camera as if predicting weather.

“Wait- really?” she says, caught off guard. Like Enobaria Hammersmith and Cashmere Lejeune, the two style icon Victors, she thinks. Girls she had wanted to be like before this, not even because of the Games or the money or because they were pretty, but because their lives seemed so exciting, because she thought certainly no one hated them for how other people liked the way they looked, because where they came from in life didn’t stop them from anything. They were their own people. That was what Frances had thought of their lives, before the arena.

Frances puts a hand to her mouth. “How kind of you to say so, Caesar,” she responds, making sure she’s saying the right things and acting the right way.

The interview is very well received. Everyone else in the Capitol with a news desk wants to interview her, and all the stylists want to dress her, and all the magazines want her on their covers, and it’s just the first few days after she’s won and it’s overwhelming, she thinks, having people who don’t even know her want her around so badly, when she’s so used to the people who know her disliking her so plainly.

All the same, she can’t sleep unless Mags is with her.

_

What had started as what she thought was an average Capitol party (or, as average as the Capitol could be) had ended with her being rescued by Enobaria Hammersmith and Cashmere Lejeune, at least for the night. Maybe too late. But, Frances realizes, this is never going to end, this will always be her life, and Enobaria and Cashmere at least lessened one night’s worth of suffering. For that, she will always be genuinely grateful to them.

It had all started out with photographs and conversations and people shoving drinks at her that she was fairly certain she shouldn’t be having, and not just because of all the addiction in her family tree.

Then one of the men who identified himself as one of the game makers congratulated her and told her to follow him and they were in a small room off the side of the hotel ballroom like a private chamber and there were others. Afterwards the game maker, he told her that this is what she’d be doing now, as a Victor, and didn’t anyone tell her? He asked the question as if it was an afterthought. He said to her, you are such a beautiful young woman, you will be very popular here. And then they had all left her and when she could manage it she pulled herself mostly together and left the room and hid in one of the staircases used by hotel staff, focusing on the cool metal walls and floor, pretending she wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere.

For whatever reason, Enobaria had come to the staircase and brought her to her hotel room to be hidden away safely. When Frances supposes the party is over and Enobaria and Cashmere are both free to go, they come to the hotel door and knock. “It’s okay,” she can hear Enobaria say, and she painfully makes her way up from the bed where she’s been lying and unlocks the door.

“Oh,” Cashmere says softly, turning on the light, “you’re just a baby...” 

“Hi,” she says quietly. She’s never met Cashmere before. She would have liked to meet her under different circumstances, and Enobaria too, but she’s grateful for their kindness. “Hi, Enobaria,” she says as Enobaria comes over to her.

“No one came to the door?” Enobaria asks, and Frances shakes her head.

“You’re one of us now,” Cashmere says, coming up next to her, and she’s on the bed sitting between the two older Victors. “I know you must be scared now. That’s okay. You can let us know. You can…be a person around us.”

“We can keep the lights on if you want,” Enobaria tells her. “And don’t worry about anyone being angry with you. A reporter asked where you were and I just said you’d gone to sleep because you weren’t used to staying up so late.” A sort of bitterness edges Enobaria’s voice, and Frances thinks Enobaria was trying to emphasize to the reporter that she is a child. Frances doesn’t feel like a child anymore. Although she supposes she must seem like one to Enobaria and Cashmere.

“Okay,” she tells Enobaria. In the morning she wakes up between them and clinging to them both, and closes her eyes and goes back to sleep for as long as she can. 

_

For the entire train ride home she stares out the window. Some hours in miserable listlessness, some hours in alert anticipation, her heart beating frantically as she stares out the window trying to see if the surroundings look familiar, if she’s almost home. “Only a few more hours,” Calpurnia says, looking at her nails. Frances wonders if Calpurnia _knows_. “I’m sure Four can’t wait to see you!”

I can’t wait to see it, she thinks. I want to walk into the ocean and stay underwater and swim so fast and quick no one can ever catch me. And maybe sometime I’d hit land, far away from here.

Annie, she tells herself. Annie is waiting for her.

Maybe Annie hates her now. She must have watched everything, and she very well could think Frances is a monster, a soulless creature killing other kids the exact way a spider toys with a fly. But then, Annie had told Frances she believed she could survive and come home, and Annie knows very well how people survive the Games.

She doesn’t know how she’ll ever tell Annie about what happened after she won.

_

On the train she makes her way to Mags’ room and knocks maybe a bit too hard. “Mags?” she asks tentatively before Mags would even have time to answer. But she does, and in a few seconds Mags has opened the door and is gesturing for her to come in.

“Come in, child,” Mags tells her and she does.

Frances is wearing one of the high-collared shirts from the train wardrobe to cover the marks on her neck. She found some of the makeup to cover up the bruises on her face and her undereye circles, but she doesn’t suppose there’s anything that can hide her bloodshot eyes, which look like she’s been in the ocean for hours.

_(Don’t you know about the special relationship Victors have with their…special friends in the Capitol?_

_You’re just like your mother you dumb slut_

_Congratulations to the femme fatale from Four!)_

“I don’t know how to say this but-” Frances tries to talk but her voice is thin and barely there. She looks down at the ground, the pale gold carpeting, and sits down on the floor, putting her head in her hands. She doesn’t know how long she’s quiet for, but she raises her head after a few moments and says, “Mags, the other girls at the Family Home say you know how to make coat-hanger.”

Mags looks at her silently for a long moment, as if trying to read her expression, and then closes her eyes. “I’m sorry,” Mags begins and for a moment Frances is afraid she’s said something she shouldn’t have, that she and everyone else at the Home was wrong. Mags looks at her directly. “I thought if you won it wouldn’t happen so soon. I really did, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I should have at least told you.”

Frances nods quietly, not knowing what else to say. “When we get to the Victor’s Village I can get you some,” Mags says then. “I am truly sorry, Frances. I want you to know that.” Frances exhales, feeling like she’s breathing out the past few weeks from her body.

“I know,” she says to Mags. It’s not Mags’ fault. She wonders if Dune knew about it all and that was why he ate those flowers, not because he didn’t know they were poison, but because he did know. But that almost definitely wasn’t what happened. She wonders how many people in the Capitol knew. If all the people who gave her the parachutes knew. If Caesar Flickerman and his studio audience knows. Certainly all the Victors must know.

“Get up,” Mags tells her gently. She does, and slumps on a chair near Mags’ bed. She feels too tired to cry or even be angry or upset. Mags strokes her hair again, and she leans her head against Mags.

“There was a Saint a very long time ago called Dymphna,” Mags begins. “A young Princess of Eire. She was devoted to the new faith, and when her mother died, her father pursued her. He had bad desires for her, you see. So Dymphna ran from him, to another land. She dedicated her life to helping the ill. But when her father’s men figured out where she had gone to, he sent for her to be retrieved by force. Her father’s soldier found Dymphna, but she refused to go. He killed her, cut her head off, because she refused.” So if you say no, you die, and it’s always been that way, Frances thinks.

“Dympha is the patron of those struggling mentally, and those who have been hurt the way you have, Frances,” Mags says. “Demon Slayer and resistor of predators, she is. Think of her as your friend when you ask for intercession. She will think of you as hers.”

But I still have to live the rest of my life like this, Frances thinks, but realizes Mags is probably right. She likes the sound of Dymphna.

“I don’t think you’re bad, Mags. I mean for making the coat-hanger. I’m sorry if anyone ever told you that you were,” Frances says, immediately wondering if she should just be quiet.

“Don’t worry about me,” Mags tells her. Her hair smells of the ocean. Frances closes her eyes for a moment and pretends she’s surrounded by green hills blessed by protector-saints and war-gods, on an island surrounded by salt-sea, a place no one in Panem knows exists.

_

When she gets off the train, none of the people waiting for her are people she knows, except Annie, to the side of the front of the crowd. That’s when she realizes she’s home, and she almost sinks to the sand-strewn pavement so unlike the smooth streets of the Capitol. She never in her life wants to leave again, and she knows she has to, but being here, for the moment, is enough.

Everyone is yelling congratulations at her and shouting her name and she looks around, completely surprised by it all, and someone, probably from the Mayor’s office or something, is putting a sash around her shoulders, and she’s walking to Annie and she can hear Annie saying _I knew you could do it, I knew you would come back_ , and for a second Frances thinks the only reason people think Annie is crazy is because she understands the world better than they do. _District Four,_ everyone is cheering, _the sea rises_! Fingers in the air making V for Victory, four fingers up for District Four. That’s our girl, people are yelling as they see her enter the crowd.

She doesn’t feel wrong. Not here. She feels like she belongs here even though she has no real home. Annie clasps her hands and embraces her, and she can hear the seagulls again, the waves in the distance.

“You were right,” she tells Annie, laughing, and Annie is smiling at her like she had known this all along, had seen it in a dream or read it in some forbidden book, “I’m finally home,” and for the moment she forgets everything else.


	2. II

“ _Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze._

_Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet._

_Age: five thousand three hundred days._

_Profession: none, or "starlet"_.”

– _Lolita_ , Vladimir Nabokov

The past months have been all right as they could have been, giving the circumstances. Maybe Frances should be happier about it. It could be much worse.

She doesn’t have to live in the Family Home anymore and never will again, but Annie still does, although Annie visits her house in the Victor’s Village all the time. Frances has no one to live with in the house. She’s gotten to spend her days with Mags, and Delmar as well, and she’s gotten to know the area around the Victor’s Village.

But legally, her mother still isn’t allowed to see her until she becomes an adult. She would have thought that being a Victor would change this, but it doesn’t. She doesn’t think she’ll ever forgive the Family Home. On the television, she was able to see some of the recaps from the Final Eight family interviews from her Games. Somehow, they hadn’t found Annie to talk to her, but the reporters had found her mother. It was the first time she’d seen her mother in years and she looked so healthy and probably the Capitol people weren’t letting her say too much but she did say _I believe my daughter can do anything_ and Frances realized the glass of water she’d been holding had been crushed to pieces in her hand and her fingers were dripping with blood, and Mags had told her she’d been saying _I hate them_ again and again. She wasn’t sure who she meant. Sometimes she still isn’t.

But she has only a few more years, she tells herself. And then. And then she’ll really be an adult and it won’t mean much in respect to the rest of her life but she and her mother can at least have each other back. The Capitol probably could have done something, she realizes, if they could find her and get her on camera. But they didn’t.

Almost every night Annie sneaks out and comes to Frances’ house in the Victor’s Village. Frances tells Annie she doesn’t want to go to the parties so much anymore. They’re so different from the ones in the Capitol, they really do feel like home, but it gets confusing, and she doesn’t want to deal with the boys anymore, they wouldn’t get it and she feels lifetimes older than them, and she doesn’t ever want to associate home with what happens _there_. Annie understands.

She couldn’t stop herself from telling Annie. She doesn’t think she’d ever be able to stop herself from telling her things. The Capitol, the arena, the dreams. The sound of the ocean waves cover the sound of secrets no one is supposed to tell.

The night before Frances has to leave for her first out-of-district stop on her Victory Tour, Annie stays over.

“I wish I didn’t have to go,” Frances says, trying not to cry. Even if Mags is coming, there’s only so much Mags can do.

“I wish I could come with you,” Annie says, her eyes pensive. 

“I’ll tell you all about it when I come back,” Frances says morosely. All Frances wants to do is stay, preferably by Annie’s side. She’ll never be able to enjoy seeing the rest of the country if it has to be this way. Annie is the one who should be traveling all around the country, but then, that would mean Annie would have to be in her place, and Frances would never want that for her.

“Just remember,” Annie tells her. “No matter how bad it gets, they don’t get to tell you who you are. They don’t know you. You’re your own person. And you’re not alone as long as I’m here,” Annie says, nodding her head.

“All right,” Frances says, wrapping her arms around Annie, never wanting to let go of her, doing her best to remind herself that what Annie says is true, trying to make sure she remembers when she’s away.

_

She’s halfway through her Victory Tour, and the worst part is she’s beginning to feel numb to it all. Maybe that’s the worst part, or maybe it would be worse if it still felt like as much of a fresh wound as it did when it began. Sometimes she feels like some kind of mechanical doll, saying a set list of statements and being dressed up and posed by others and not really being alive.

Although if that was true, it wouldn’t be so difficult. No one seems to think it’s difficult for her, though. The photographers all say she’s a natural star, born for the cameras, and the stylists say she’s such a beautiful girl that anyone could see it even from across an arena, and the reporters are saying she’s the most popular Victor in recent years and everyone loves her. Frances wonders what love means, then. If it means something different for other people, or if the kind of love she gets is just different from the kind of love more normal, clean, better people get.

She hears the Mayor in District Six say after a few drinks during the feast there to one of his Peacekeepers _I can’t believe we have to host that little monster like an honored guest_ and the Mayor’s wife laughs bitterly and says _if I didn’t know any better I’d think she was a truck stop whore she talks like one too_ and Frances can’t even blame them because she’d trapped the District Six girl in her net and speared her with her trident and blown kisses to the camera and sometimes she can still hear how the girl had screamed right before the trident pierced her flesh. And she knows she’ll never inspire real love in anyone.

While Calpurnia is distracted talking about luxury cars with some of the people at the District Six party, Frances wanders off until she finds a restroom, which she hopes will be empty so she can just be alone. In the tall, gray-framed mirrors she sees someone she wouldn’t have recognized a year ago, but after she’s had enough makeovers, she recognizes herself well enough now. This is how the world sees her, when they’re not picturing her in the arena, covered in mud and algae and blood or naked and washing it all off of her as if it could ever really come off.

She turns on the sink and washes some of the glitter out of the corner of her eye. The stylists are so heavy with the brushes that it always ends up in her eyes and the feel of it drives her out of her mind. Today the glitter is grayish, like the ocean on a dark day or like metals to make cars and hovercrafts and trains with. They had her in a racing jacket and denim shorts and high-heeled boots earlier today acting as the flag girl in the annual car race in Six, which usually happens around the Victory Tour for maximum publicity.

“Hey,” says a faint voice and Frances almost jumps, how startled she is. She turns around and recognizes Lupine Gears, one of the District Six Victors who she met earlier in the feast. (The other was Axle Leclerc, who definitely had shot up before it all started, but he seemed nice enough, although he was very distant and Lupine seemed to be guiding him around. Frances vaguely remembers Axle’s Games. She was at Uncle Cormac’s house at the time, and the arena had been the worst thing she’d ever seen, a dank and dark cave network filled with dripping stalactites and stalagmites and infested with rabid, screaming bat mutts. Most of the tributes who survived the bloodbath stayed by the cornucopia, right outside of the caves, but they were mobbed by the bats on the final night and most of them died horrifically, except for Axle, who had camouflaged himself in the dirt at the mouth of the cave, and his wide, bloodshot, disbelieving eyes had haunted her as the announcer named him the Victor and two clear, watery lines formed on his face under his eyes, exposing the skin beneath the camouflage. Frances had been so upset by the whole thing that even Uncle Cormac had noticed, and he’d told her to go make tea while Mara rolled her eyes and said something about Frances not being able to face reality just like her mother.)

Lupine is sitting on the tiled floor, a morphling needle in one of her hands, her eyelids drooping downwards, dark hair messy and tangled like she’s in bed, but Frances can see her downcast face is gentle and kind.

“Oh,” says Frances. “Hi. Lupine. It’s nice to see you again.” It really is, she thinks. She doesn’t remember Lupine winning, maybe she wasn’t born yet or was too young to remember, but Lupine was very nice to her, warmly embracing her and saying it was nice to meet her, and she sounded much more genuine than most other people she’s met. Maybe Lupine did bad things like her, too, and she doesn’t judge. Or maybe she’s just a very understanding person.

Frances doesn’t know if she should address the fact that Lupine escaped the party to shoot up. “You’re so pretty,” Lupine says, with sadness in her voice. “I wish they would be nice to you.” But I wasn’t ever nice to anyone, she thinks, so why should I expect anything like that.

“Thank you,” she says, sitting down next to Lupine, because there isn’t any reason she can see not to. “I think you look pretty too.” She really does, and her black velvet dress is a little big for her, but it’s very nice. Lupine has bangles that make clinking sounds when she moves her hands.

“Don’t ever do this shit,” Lupine says to her placidly.

Frances finds herself saying, “I know. My mom did it and she’s not allowed to see me until I’m an adult even though she stopped. I’ve always been scared to do it.” She pauses for a moment. “I’m sorry you’re doing it,” she tells her, lowering her voice.

Lupine shrugs. “It felt like the only thing I could do,” she says. “After I won and they started doing things to me. And then the morphling made everything go away. It made the whole world shine like a perfect dream and I never wanted to wake up. And I got so good at dreaming I was bad at everything else.” She gives a sad smile, looking out of the corner of her eyes at Frances. “And, well. My family paid for it.” Lupine inhales, her head tilting backwards. “But then I didn’t have a reason to stop after that,” she says distantly.

Frances finds herself shoulder to shoulder with Lupine, slouching on the ground together with her. “You seem like a good kid,” Lupine says.

“I don’t think I am,” she confesses.

“I didn’t think I was, either,” Lupine tells her. “Made it easier to hurt myself.”

“Oh,” Frances says. She hadn’t really thought of it like that before. It makes her want to find her mother, now, regardless of what the custody laws are. She’s in the Capitol’s custody now, she supposes. Always will be. “Well, I think you’re nice,” she tells Lupine. She wonders if anyone ever tells Lupine that. She wonders if anyone tells Lupine anything.

Lupine pets her hair and Frances giggles a little, so Lupine does too. “Damn,” Lupine says, looking in the mirror. “I got my makeup all smudged.”

“I can do yours,” Frances offers.

Lupine gives her a tired smile. “All right, kid,” she says. So she kneels in front of Lupine, gets the small bag out of her purse, and Lupine chooses a dark green eyeshadow and a wine-red lipstick and Frances makes her up with her own hands that are steadier than she’s noticed them being in a while.

_

She realizes that being on her Victory Tour means it’s been (only?) six months since her Games, and that means six months is the same exact amount of time until the next Games, and Frances thanks every god and saint she can think of that she won’t have to be a mentor, not yet. (“Not for another few years,” Delmar had assured her, “that’s how it works for districts like us, when we have enough Victors”. Which hadn’t felt very assuring because sometimes she feels like she’s just waiting to be an adult in hopes maybe things will be a little better.) 

Part of the Tour is visiting the Capitol.

The first night she hides out with Cashmere and Enobaria in their hotel room and when morning comes and she has to leave them she cries and she thinks Cashmere looks like she’s about to also, and Enobaria is biting her lip and shaking her head. “You can cry here,” Enobaria tells her. “But don’t let them see you cry. They don’t deserve that part of you. There are parts of us that none of them are ever going to get.” Frances wonders if this is something Enobaria is reminding herself, just as much as she’s telling Frances. “Remember that.” Frances nods her head and Cashmere reaches out with a towel and wipes her face.

“Remember you’ll see us soon,” Cashmere says. She’s talking about the fashion magazine photoshoot where all three of them are supposed to model for. Which isn’t something she’s particularly looking forward to, but when she has to do Capitol events, the only time she feels even close to safe is around Cashmere and Enobaria. The only time she feels understood, like a person and not an object or a monster. Enobaria smiles at her.

“If you can control your own style, you can control your image,” Enobaria tells her. The words sound almost hopeful. Like she can maybe get to that point one day. Frances thinks about that, what it means for her, and Enobaria, and Cashmere. Not that they can ever control their lives enough to be free of all of this. But that they can control their image well enough that no one they don’t want to will ever be able to see past the image, no one will ever _have_ them by knowing them. And maybe, Frances thinks, that’s why the two of them have been standing so resiliently for so long, why nothing has broken them once and for all, the way she very often feels something is coming for her one day or another.

Frances remembers her mother, and Annie, and District Four. She tells herself she is a murderer many times over, and she survived the arena, and so she has to be able to deal with these strange Capitol people. She can do what they ask, and excel at it, so well they do not notice she is not giving them anything else, not a single inch. Like Enobaria and her severe fashion designs worn like armor and Cashmere and her pretty smile that distracts from unreadable eyes. That, she realizes, is what she has to do.

She silently allows the stylists to dress her and make her up for the gala at the President’s mansion (he’s not going to be at the party, he’s too busy for that sort of thing. She’s grateful for that, and tells herself to remind herself that it could be worse and he could be there. Because this is all his design, and she’s afraid of him, right down to her bones, more afraid than she’s ever been of anyone, and she has no idea how badly she would break if she saw him so soon, so intimately in his own home at a party celebrating her life sentence of being the Capitol’s pretty little thing.) 

And so she walks into the party, smiling and greeting everyone she remembers by name, dressed in blue silk and white pearls that lay cold against her skin.

“Thank you!” she says to them, because after all, they’ve organized this all surrounding her. In theory, it’s about her. Even if it’s really something they do every year, it’s nothing personal, whoever wins, they have to hold a celebration and the people here like celebrations. But, she supposes, not all of them hurt her. Not all of them want to, not all of them would if they were given the chance, and many don’t even know. She’s sure many of them even see the Games as a rough fact of life rather than a just punishment, which still forever separates them, but is less malicious than the President and his game makers and the buyers and what they’ve done to her, and Dune, and Cashmere and Enobaria, and everyone he put in her path, everyone in the arena whether or not they made it out. So maybe, in a small way, she can stand to be thankful. Calpurnia, at least, deserves gratitude, for being kind to her and letting her do her own thing sometimes. The servers and bartenders and workers at the party haven’t done anything wrong.

It’s not entirely a lie, she supposes. But it mostly is, and mostly it always will be, and she wonders what everyone else here is hiding. That in a place like this, all the truth must be hidden. 

_ 

She’s never told anyone, and doesn’t know how she ever would, but in her own way, she really is grateful to have been in the Games.

It was the one time in her life she was able to defend herself.

_

When she finally gets back home, to her house in the Victor’s Village, one thing that really is hers in a way, she gets in bed and falls asleep probably faster than she ever has.

Lying in bed, closing her eyes, she remembers being much younger, a thousand lifetimes younger, and living with her mother. It was one of her mother’s good days and she’d said, “Frances, I’m going to tell you something about the world. No one is ever going to give us anything. And if they do, it’s not ours. It’s theirs. If you ever have anything, it’s because you worked for it or fought for it, one way or another.” And Frances had nodded her head, because that had seemed right in line with what she’d seen in the world.

She wakes up in the middle of the afternoon the next day and doesn’t get out of bed, not until the sun sets. The clock says it’s eight o’clock at night, and the answering machine on her bedstand is blinking with a larger number of messages than any normal person would have in the amount of time she’s been asleep- probably mostly from Calpurnia, Frances thinks guiltily, hoping Calpurnia doesn’t think she’s walked into the ocean to die or ran away to sail the coasts with a group of fishermen.

She wonders how many of them are from Mags, who probably will be even more worried, knowing the truth. (She can’t tell Calpurnia the truth because she’s afraid to tell anyone from there the truth, because she doesn’t want to blame her, because some part deep down inside is terrified that she knew all along.) And Annie…well, Annie doesn’t usually leave messages, not from the pay phones or any of the phones at the Family Home.

Frances gets dressed and doesn’t bother to put on shoes as she goes outside and walks a few houses down to knock on Mags’ door.

Within a few moments, Mags opens the door. “Frances,” she says warmly, with concern. “I was wondering when I’d see you. Come in.” Frances walks inside, rubbing the sand on the soles of her feet off on the rug where guests are supposed to put their shoes. She can smell black tea leaves, hot and newly prepared. 

Frances considers saying anything about the Victory Tour. About meeting Lupine, about the blank stares so many of the people in other districts had given her, about how she felt happy when she was received in District Four and she wasn’t supposed to feel happy and that must mean something is truly wrong with her, about Cashmere and Enobaria, about the first stop in Twelve and how at the feast she didn’t want to know what was happening around her so she got so hammered even Haymitch Abernathy told her _hey, slow down sweetheart._ She supposes she can save this for another time, because she and Mags, after all, have the rest of their lives for memories. The price and payment of being a Victor.

“Mags,” Frances says as Mags guides her to the blue couch in her living room, decorated by Delmar’s driftwood art pieces. “I came here to ask you something. Maybe a lot of things. I thought it was time.”

Mags looks at her, her eyes full of understanding, and says nothing.

“I’m ready,” Frances says, nodding to herself. “Just...whatever else I need to know about being a Victor, and a mentor, whatever I have to do, whatever you’ve learned, I’m ready to hear it.” I have to be, she thinks. “Don’t worry about upsetting me or anything. I can take it. I have to hear it,” she says, her voice sounding like a desperate plea despite how much she’s trying to steel herself, in a hope that she knows is vain, that if she feels strong for a moment she may manage to make it last forever. 

At least, she thinks, as Mags begins talking, if she isn’t strong now, Mags is one of the people who could have any hope of making her so.

_

One night, she and Annie are at the beach.

“I can leave the family home early,” says Annie, halfway into their conversation, as if she’d forgotten to mention it. Maybe she did, Frances thinks, or maybe she was saving it to announce it like this. Annie’s eyes are hard and determined, her face calm. “They say if you’re sixteen or older and you get a job, have a place to stay and an adult who can verify it all, you can leave.”

“I’m so happy for you!” Frances says after a moment of stunned silence, wrapping her soaked arms around Annie, and Annie draws her in closer, pushing them both down into the water and Frances laughs as she’s pushed down into the shallows. “What are you going to do?”

“Well,” Annie begins, “I found a job as a safety instructor on one of those tourist ferries. It’s not very difficult because all I have to do is basically explain to the Capitol tourists what they should do if they fall off the boat or how to put on life jackets and all that. At least it’s mostly easy enough, but getting through to some of these people, it’s like, _hogis durs evav!_ Like my soul came out.” She rolls her eyes, half smiling. “But it pays good enough money and gets me out of that place.” Better than getting Reaped, Frances thinks. “And guess what,” Annie says like she’s about to tell a secret, an enjoyable one.

“I can’t guess,” Frances says. Besides, she always likes being told secrets when it’s Annie telling them.

“Mags says I can stay with her. For however long,” Frances gasps happily, wondering why Mags didn’t tell her, if it was meant to be a surprise. “We can basically be neighbors soon!”

“No more sneaking around,” Frances says, “soon we can go anywhere as long as we stay here.”

Annie looks down at the water, putting her hand level to the mostly still surface. “You know, Frances,” she says quietly, “if I could get you free too, I would. Whenever you leave I’m so afraid for you. If I could make it so that you never had to leave here, that no one could ever find you. I would.” Annie raises her head and nods like a soldier about to execute a command, her eyes soft and gentle.

Frances will not allow herself to cry upon receiving kindness, she thinks. Yes, sure, Victors often have odd habits, like Cashmere biting her nails so ferociously she always has to wear false ones in public, Enobaria flossing her teeth until her mouth bleeds, Delmar only eating food he prepares himself. For Frances, it’s the fact that she cries all the time. But that is far more noticeable than anyone else’s and could likely land her in trouble, and so she goes to great pains to hide it. 

“I know you would, Annie,” Frances tells her, instead, putting her hand on top of Annie’s. Their hands join underwater. “I wish you could. If anyone could do something amazing like that it would be you.” She lowers her voice even more to say what comes next. “I hope one day you find the other places in the world,” Frances says. She truly does, she wants to believe they exist for Annie’s sake. Annie deserves more than this world around them. Annie was not built for such a small, restrictive, limited place- she was made for places with thousands of years of history, places where the idea of a whole world is a given and not a dangerous idea. Even though part of Frances never wants to leave District Four in her life, and sometimes thinks she would not leave even to see anywhere else in the world if it existed, because this is all she has, this is who she is, for better or worse, and leaving has never done her any good.

Annie doesn’t say anything back at first. Later, Frances realizes she probably shouldn’t be so surprised, but in the moment, she certainly is when Annie leans forward and kisses her, and Frances kisses her back, and holds onto her like the current will move all the way down to the shallows and pull them away if they don’t keep close. Annie tastes like salt and clams and cool water, and her thick, wet hair falls around Frances’ face and shoulders like a dark velvet veil and Frances never wants to come back out of the water.

“You’re the only person,” Frances tells her, so softly because she’s afraid she’ll cry if she exerts her voice too much, “the only person who’s ever touched me who I wanted to do it.” You’re the only person I’ve ever wanted to touch me, she thinks.

There is a sadness in Annie’s eyes, a deep and old sadness that Frances sometimes sees in the other Victors. “I’m sorry,” Annie says with gravity Frances has never heard in someone their age before.

“Don’t be,” Frances says. You’re not the one who should be sorry, she thinks, but decides not to say it. She doesn’t want to think of any of them, not now. They don’t get to be a part of this, too.

Frances rests her head on Annie’s shoulder and Annie holds onto her as the calm waves rise and fall against them.

_

Frances’ seventeenth birthday, is, like all her others, in the summer, after the period of the Games. Seventeen and, on the inside, as aged and weathered as seaglass. Maybe on the outside, too, but no one can see. Her “invitation” to the Capitol extends through the weekend of her birthday, during which, she is told, she is meant to spend the nights with Otho Statler, Minister of Finances.

They won’t even let her bring a guest from home for her stupid fucking Capitol birthday party, she thinks, missing Annie miserably, as she’s photographed for some magazine for teenage girls who are deluded enough by Snow’s propaganda machine to want to be in her four-inch-heeled shoes. At least if she could bring Annie here, albeit with the promise that nothing would happen to her, they’d be able to share in the joke together, because this is all so ridiculous. Because sometimes, she turns off enough parts of her mind that she is overwhelmed by how laughable it all can be. Of course, she supposes, that’s their image, just as she has her very distracting image of the pretty little airhead so no one can see her rage and misery and terror, to distract from everything else. Frances isn’t so dumb that she can’t figure out President Snow is calculating enough to realize that the outrageous flamboyance of the Capitol is a very good distraction for the true sickness of its society.

They do let her cut the cake, which is decorated to look like an ocean. She holds the long knife and looks at it, smiling humorously, and everyone laughs because it’s so funny, isn’t it. She’ll always be a Victor even in her pretty dresses and layers of makeup. (She’ll always be a District street girl ready for a fight, dangerous if not under proper control, those District Four drunks are always getting themselves in trouble.) She’s sure the news photographers got many angles of her holding the knife before cutting the first piece.

What they don’t see behind her expression is that she is imagining taking the knife and carving up her face until she is so unrecognizable and horrifying to Capitol sensibilities that none of these people would ever want to touch her, let alone look at pictures of her or watch videos of her ever, ever again.

The idea of that, now that makes her smile.

When Otho Statler leads her into his room and pulls her hair so playfully like he’s her classmate in the schoolyard, she reminds herself of that image, and she laughs. 

“What my wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” he says as if they share a secret together. “Well, she probably knows, come to think of it. Figure of speech.” She supposes they do share a secret anyway. He’d told her he was the secret benefactor who gave her the spider necklace in the arena. _Did you know it was I who sent that to you? My little black widow,_ he called her, exiting the party, pinching her thigh.

“Your wife?” Frances asks, heightening her voice, asking the question like it means nothing, like nothing she says means anything. Because sometimes she wonders, with the married ones, if their wives know. If they don’t know. If they hate their husbands for it or if they hate her. If Frances should hate them, or feel sorry for them.

“Well, she’s barely home,” Otho laughs, “so that gives me a lot of time to have company. Even when I should be working!” he says, laughing a carefree laugh that she supposes he wouldn’t be letting out if his employer, the President, were here. “But don’t worry, Frances, dear,” he says, picking her up and placing her next to the pillows on his bed, his breath smelling sickening with wine. “You’re my favorite out of all the girls.”

Frances smiles modestly. “Oh,” she says, “Mr. Statler, you’re so kind.” But it gets her thinking, if he’ll reveal something so personal to her, because he’s drunk or because he doesn’t care what she hears or because he thinks she’s nobody and it doesn’t matter what she hears…who else would speak openly in front of her? What other truths are out there that she can uncover as easily as this, that will make the world around her more visible behind the colorful mask this city wears?

“It’s easy after a long day at work with that dreadful Septimus Whitman,” Otho Statler grumbles, rolling his eyes in reference to the Minister of Health, another loathsome patron Frances is personally acquainted with. “He not only interrupted me during my speech, but he interrupted the President. Hopefully he’ll get himself poisoned soon,” he says, shaking his head - and Frances does not ask anything, but she starts thinking about what he’s said- “but enough talk about work. That sort of talk isn’t fit for your pretty little head. You’re the only poison I want to hear about when I’m out of work. Tell me, dear, what do you think of the new bedsheets? I had the servants make sure they would be warm for your arrival.”

How thoughtful of you, Mr. Statler. We don’t have anything like this in District Four, your house is so beautiful. I’m so grateful for your affections. What can I do to comfort you? You must have had such a long day. But I can take care of you for the night. Yes, let me take care of you.

It’s like following a script at this point.

She stays awake as Otho Statler falls into a drunken sleep and thinks about the possibilities held in secrets. Poison, she thinks, considering that as she lies awake, unable to rest.

Otho Statler does not complain at all to the President, and Frances is allowed to return home after the celebrations, to District Four, where Annie, Mags, and Delmar are all alive, and she can still hope to one day see her mother, because Maeve Odair is also alive too.

Frances sees coverage of her birthday party on the news, with the reporters briefly naming Otho Statler as a “celebrity guest” along with other big names, and she wonders, aside from her, what other secrets the President and his men are keeping.

She is not surprised when, a few weeks later, she hears Septimus Whitman has passed away from what is being reported as heart failure, and she says nothing.

_

Frances stares beyond the face of the man on top of her (the man who made her tie herself to his bedpost using her own knot, _that’s good, fish mart_ ) and up to the ceiling of the hotel room, focusing on the voices of Caesar Flickerman and Claudius Templesmith recapping the Cornucopia bloodbath on the television playing on low volume. Silently, in her mind, she calls upon Patrick the Saint for his protection and guidance. She doesn’t expect any miracles, so she asks none of him. But all the same, she allows herself to imagine him raising his staff and spreading his arms, robed in a green the pure and deep color of the hills of his isle, driving everyone in the Capitol who has ever touched her far away and into the ocean, never to resurface again.

Another man says to her, turning down the lights, “I find it incredible, how long you can hold your breath for.” And before she can even take off her clothes his hands are around her neck like he wants to kill her right then and there, and her last thoughts before she loses consciousness are of raising her hands to the sky and calling to the Morrigna to bring this man to annihilation.

One night she is still bleeding, still in horrible pain when she gets back to her room and is unable to sleep. She closes her saltwater eyes and imagines Dymphna the Demon Slayer with the man from tonight chained at her feet like one of her imprisoned devils, and Dymphna the Saint and Martyress, crowned in lilies, draws her into her embrace and heals her with her sacred touch.

_

By the time Frances has turned eighteen, she thinks she is as hard as anchor steel. All the harder to handle it all. She drinks when she’s asked, when it fits the situation, but never on her own volition, and she makes it go down her throat like water. She sleeps as little as possible so she won’t dream of the swamp, of Ermine and the alligators, of Amber, the parachutes, the scream of the District Six girl. She says “well? What will it be?” with almost impatient briskness to the newer and younger men, the ones who believe they are intimidated by her, because they want the fantasy of an imposing beautiful woman choosing them and scorning all the others, and it’s the closest she can come to acting how she truly feels. She accepts the offer from _Gentleman_ magazine to pose for their centerfold and when they photograph her naked and up to her thighs in water in a studio made to look like the seashore at night, with images of lightning bolts imposed on the background and her skin wet and glittering and tinged blue and silver and purple, she lets her rage and hatred out in her eyes. Powerful, says the photographer, sexy, give us more.

They still say _what a pretty little thing_ she is. She feels like Lupine Gears, like she lost decades of her life and is now older than her face will let on. She hasn’t even started mentoring yet. She’s old enough this year, but she’s been told they probably won’t be selecting her for a mentorship position. By next year, she supposes, she will go around with blank eyes like that of dead fish. The stylists will have a very difficult time hiding that. But she supposes she’s even better at hiding her true self than they are.

Everyone in the Capitol is very good at hiding things. _The President is going to get rid of that District Two Mayor, maybe under new management they’ll finally have another Victor, maybe another girl to join you and Cash and Eno, won’t that be something. Oh Frances you look like my sister when she was young. The Tribute Parade costumes have been so much better ever since Tigris fell off the map, that’s what she gets for getting sentimental over those tributes._ Although very often they let their guard down around her, because they can, because they’re convinced she’s the one who’s letting her guard down, because they think she doesn’t understand, because they think telling her is as secure as telling a wall. And in a way, it is. She has no one to tell. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t forget what she learns, and cannot ever use it.

She has realized that people in the Capitol underestimate the people in the Districts so much that they demonstrate by their actions they think knowledge is no use to people like her. Maybe it’s just because they see her as a thing to touch. All the same. Their arrogance would be incomprehensible, she thinks, if not for the fact that everything in their lives serves as confirmation that they are right.

After this visit, after this summer, she tells herself, she can go home for another year, mostly. And she can find her mother, and give her the money from the magazine spread, if she’ll have it. She thinks of how Delmar has essentially retreated from his family and never sees them anymore, and how even Mags said when she won years ago her family still loved her but never looked at her the same way again, and hopes her mother can forgive her for what she is. She doesn’t have to, Frances thinks, it’s her right not to. But that doesn’t mean she can’t forgive her mother, for things her mother didn’t control, and even for the things she did.

She realizes vacantly, it’s yet another Reaping away from Annie, and hopes she’s doing all right. When it first began, Frances was always so afraid for Annie, so afraid she didn’t realize how nervous Annie was herself. On the television screen the District Four Reaping ceremony is beginning, and Calpurnia walks out wearing a glittery dress with a sailor collar, and a gaudy dolphin pendant.

When Annie’s name is called, Annie opens her mouth slightly as if in shock, and then closes it, nodding her head to herself and quietly walking up to the stage, her expression somewhat stunned and mostly unreadable. Frances doesn’t even realize what she’s doing until she’s already called up Mags’ number.

“Mags,” she says, hearing how detached her voice sounds, wondering how often she sounds like that, hearing her shaking fingers tapping against the telephone receptor. “I need to be a mentor this year.”

Annie isn’t going to die in the arena, Frances thinks to herself faintly. She’ll do whatever she has to do, and show Annie how to survive, although, she realizes, Annie probably doesn’t need that much help in terms of knowledge and resourcefulness. Annie will live, she thinks.

The night before the tributes are scheduled to arrive in the Capitol, Frances climbs to the rooftop of the Training Center, her heart racing and her hands shaking, and prays to the Morrigna to make Annie’s blood run hot and red with victory.

_

President Snow telephones her to say he’s heard she will be taking on additional responsibilities this Games season and becoming a mentor for the first time and he wishes her luck and hopes she isn’t overexerting herself too much because that wouldn’t be very wise of her would it, given how busy she will be already, and she says no of course not Mr. President I am just very dedicated to my work for Panem. And he says, yes, Miss Odair, keep up the good work. A threat, she supposes, but then again, from him, what isn’t. How would he kill her, if he thought he had to, she wonders- would it be poison? Or is poison just for his inner circle, for things best left unsaid outside his Presidential mansion. Would he even bother to kill her, she wonders, or if he would figure the best punishment for her would be doing nothing but let her life run out its course as eternal Capitol property.

This is what the rest of Annie’s life will be, Frances realizes, no choice in either life or death, and she stays up half the night crying. You have to try and be strong for Annie, she tells herself, none of this come morning.

When the sun rises and it’s time for her to get ready, she lets the stylists erase any traces of the night, and makes herself walk forward to meet Annie and prepare her for victory.

_

As a mentor, Frances is allowed to be close to Annie. For Annie’s sake and her own, she can’t let any of the wrong people figure it out. Mags knows, and won’t tell anyone, Delmar is the same, and besides, he’s so preoccupied with his mentoring of his extremely anxious tribute, Isle, that he barely has time to notice anything else.

Frances hates herself for thinking that Isle will only drag Annie down, but she’s seen enough over the years to know how it works and sometimes there’s no nice way to phrase things that are horrible.

“I just want you to know,” Annie tells her in private, on the rooftop where no one can listen in on them, “I’ve never held what you had to do in order to get out of there against you.” Her voice is calm, maybe too much so. “I don’t know what I’ll have to do,” she says. “I just wanted you to know…” she trails off, and Frances can feel herself interrupting, not wanting to hear her say it.

“You’ll get out of there,” Frances says, even though they both know that getting out just means getting into another trap, one you can never get out of, because that’s the world they live in because maybe this is all there is left on earth. “I know you will, Annie. If I could do it, you can. And you’re so smart and level-headed and you always know what to do and nothing ever gets you down, I don’t think anyone else would have the chances you do,” she says, almost pleadingly. She realizes this comes less from wanting to believe it (because she actually does; and Annie had gotten one of the highest scores) and wanting Annie to believe it, not wanting to allow Annie to come even close to giving up.

“That’s not what I was going to say,” Annie says, smiling sadly.

Frances looks at her wordlessly, waiting to hear what Annie has to tell her. “I was going to say that I wanted you to know that I love you,” she says matter-of-factly in that clear voice of hers that makes her sound so worldly and at ease. “And not only as my best friend, Frances. Because…I think you feel the same way. And I want you to know I feel the same way.”

It’s not that she didn’t know, Frances realized, but that she didn’t think she deserved it so she didn’t allow herself to think about it. But she isn’t going to say something like that to Annie the night before she has to spend possibly weeks fighting for her life.

“I do,” she answers quietly. “I love you, Annie.” She wishes they could spend the night up there, in the warm air, completely apart from everyone else. They hold onto each other, looking past the city skyline, up at the night sky. She closes her eyes and puts her face against Annie’s neck.

Annie begins singing the old song that she’d been humming on the train, for the first time here saying the words out loud, beginning, _ari im sokhag, t’vogh partez merin_ …Frances has never heard a more haunting song, and she thinks she’d feel the same way even if she didn’t know what the words meant. It sounds slow and calming, but there’s something ominous and painful about it. Annie ends the song, _bazen vor yekov’ vordis irrets’av, rrazmi yergeri dzaynov k’nets’av…_ ”he fell asleep to war songs”, she thinks it means. And Frances thinks Annie truly will make it out of the arena. Not because Annie is particularly murderous, or because she is a likely Capitol favorite. But because being a Victor is the closest thing people who have the misfortune to live under Capitol rule have to becoming known parts of history, and that is what Annie was meant for. A world that let girls like her be people and not things, even if being a Victor is not being a person of your own. 

Frances realizes she is crying, which she thinks is a horrible thing to do to Annie on a night like this. “I just really love you,” she tells Annie, and Annie kisses her and tells her, I do too, and looks her directly in the eyes and says so fervently it soothes Frances, to see Annie believing the words she’s saying –

“I will come back. I will.”

_

Delmar and Frances watch the Games together on the same television, and when Isle’s head is cut off by the boy from Ten and Annie lunges at him and kills him and then runs, she sees him put his head in his hands silently, exhaling like he’s trying to breathe poison out of his system.

“It never gets easier, does it,” Frances asks, wondering how many times Delmar has had to see his tributes die. She’s grateful Annie survived the encounter, and silently mouths a prayer in thanks to the Morrigna. But she doesn’t want to seem happy about Isle’s death in front of Delmar.

“No,” he says, “but you already know that nothing gets easier.” Frances looks over at Delmar and puts her arm around his shoulder, wishing that it was possible for it to be easier to deal with even if nothing ever gets better. 

She keeps her eye on the section of the screen where Annie is hiding, and the more time goes by, the more it seems to her that no one is finding her, no one will come for her. In the other sections on the screen, children push each other to their deaths off the edge of the canyon, they disembowel and strangle each other, they collapse and die.

Then the ground starts shaking, and the water rises, and Annie stands up and leaves the cave, walking with more purpose than she’s ever seen anyone walk with, and jumps into the water that is rising outside of the mouth of the cave, her face still and determined. There is screaming from some of the other tributes who are swept underwater, some frantically try to use their backpacks as rafts. Annie’s face has barely changed, and her strokes are still strong.

She is going to win, Frances thinks, she’s almost there.

She thinks that for the next three days.

_

Frances visits Annie’s room the day after the Games end- all Victors are allowed a few days’ rest afterwards, or at least, relative rest. The cameras don’t try and break down the door or look through the windows, at least.

She doesn’t want to let Annie know how afraid she is for her, still. Not just because of what might come next, but because what happened in the past is never going to leave her. “Frances!” Annie says when the door opens, not moving from her place on top of her bedsheets, sitting up with her back against a stack of pillows.

“Annie,” she says, realizing whatever the expression on her face is, it’s probably betraying her.

Annie stretches out her hands in front of her face, observing them almost like a doctor, making her wrists turn in a circular motion. “I had scars,” she says, “on my right palm and on my left thumb down to the wrist. I know I did,” she says, like she’s trying to commit it to memory, fear in her eyes. “I know I did, Frances. I think they got rid of them when they made me over. But you saw me get the wounds, didn’t you?” her eyes widen as if she’s trying to see how long she can go without blinking.

“Yes,” Frances says, her throat thick. “Yes, you did. They get rid of your wounds in remake when you win. I-” she isn’t sure what to say, if she should apologize or not.

“So it was real,” Annie says, almost sounding like she’s saying it to herself, even if she’s looking straight at Frances. “They wouldn’t answer me. I kept asking if my scars were real or not and they kept saying in those voices, don’t worry, you’re all better now they we’ve put you through remake.” She looks down at her palms and brings them to her face, inhaling through her fingers. “It was real,” she says, her voice stifled by her hands.

Frances gets up on the bed, opposite from Annie. “It was real,” she tells her. “It was. Even if it doesn’t feel like it sometimes.” The worst thing, and the most necessary thing, sometimes, is remembering, she thinks.

“Do you think,” Annie begins, swallowing hard, “they want us to think it wasn’t real and that’s why they do it. Or at least, they want other people to forget what it was for us.”

Now that Annie’s said that, Frances thinks she’s probably right, but also, she can’t go saying things like that. And for what feels like the thousandth time, she thinks Annie isn’t made for such a world, where people are supposed to be trapped with their thoughts.

Frances gestures around them and points to her ears, biting her lip, and Annie nods in understanding. Annie looks around as if to make sure no one is looking through the windows, and then mouths, _yes._ Frances nods. She’s fairly certain Annie really is right about this, and she at least deserves to be told that. She deserves someone being truthful with her, and if Frances can’t give her that, then she can’t really claim she cares about Annie.

Annie looks up at her. “I know it was all real,” she says quietly. “Even without being shown the recaps…but…” she takes a deep breath in, and Frances has never seen her so troubled. There is, even now, still a certainty in her eye that none of the self-assured Capitolites can compare to. “When I was in the water,” she says, her voice low, “after a while I thought it was just a dream. Not everything. But the water, the flood. After being in the same place for long enough I…it stopped feeling possible. I started to think it was a dream and when they dragged me out I thought I had missed something. I kept asking them what happened. And some of them started saying they thought I had gone mad. I don’t know. I remember seeing Isle die…” she puts her head in her hands. “I remember hiding. Because I just needed a break from it all after that and then the water rose and…they said I was just there treading water for three days. That’s almost…seventy five hours, something like that. Staying in the exact same place doing the exact same thing. That’s what they said. Frances…” she sounds genuinely afraid. “Is that true?”

Frances rubs her burning eye. “Yes,” she says. “Yes. That’s what happened. In the viewing room where all the mentors are, we had all these screens, not just the regular televised edit and we saw it. Me and Delmar and everyone else too.”

Annie nods her head, closing her eyes. “Okay,” she says. “I just wanted to make sure I didn’t do anything I didn’t remember. And that what they told me…what I remember…are the same things.”

After the boy from Ten had killed Isle, Annie plunged her sword into him and ran off. Before that, at the Cornucopia, she had killed the District Six girl. Frances thinks Annie is asking if she had killed anyone and forgot about it. “You remembered right,” Frances says. “You were just there for three days. You didn’t even drink any of the water.” Annie must have been horribly dehydrated, Frances realizes nervously, to the point where it would have endangered her life possibly more than the waters surrounding her. “And…I think it was amazing. You survived. I don’t even know if most people from Four could survive that long.” Frances realizes it’s probably sick for her to be grateful that Annie survived, when it was wrong for her to have to go to the arena in the first place, when the arenas shouldn’t even exist.

“I heard them drown,” she says then, looking past Frances, past the walls, looking into the past days. “I didn’t look up or around, I didn’t want to do too much unnecessary movement. So I didn’t see their faces in the sky. And I didn’t even see most of them drown, even the ones who were nearby me. But I heard them struggling until they didn’t. And then the cannons.” She closes her eyes again, and Frances thinks she must be seeing the flooded canyon clearly, just as Frances sometimes closes her eyes and sees the verdant swamp.

“You’re here now, though,” Frances tells her. “You’re never going to have to go back.”

“I dreamed of it last night,” Annie says. “I kept treading water and I couldn’t hear anyone. It was just the water and me, like it was all there was in the world.”

“I dream of mine, too,” Frances tells her. “But…” she looks Annie in the eyes, and Annie seems to come back to the room mentally. “You’re the strongest person I know, Annie. Dreaming about it doesn’t mean anything bad about you. And…I’ll always be willing to talk about any of it with you,” she says. She thinks Annie might be more willing to talk about hers, than Frances is willing to talk about her own sometimes, but then, she doesn’t want to additionally burden Annie with her own horrors any more than she already does. Both of them met when they were alone in the world, and now as Victors, they are both even more alone in the world. Maybe this was how it was meant to be, she thinks. Given what the world is like, maybe in a way, it’s acceptable.

“I think maybe if they keep replaying the video footage of it…it will be less confusing…when I have to go out again,” Annie says, and Frances is almost reassured, to see Annie beginning to build herself back up.

“When you go on your Victory Tour,” Frances says, not caring if other arrangements have been made, she’ll do what she has to do to make this happen if there are obstacles, “I’ll come with you. I was your mentor. They have to let me,” she says, and hopes Mags or Delmar or both of them will be allowed too.

Annie smiles, and all the remake work in the world can’t mask the exhaustion in her eyes. She is still the most beautiful girl Frances has ever seen. Annie puts her arm over Frances’ shoulder and leans back, the two of them on the bed next to each other, looking up at the ceiling.

“I don’t want you to have to be like me,” Frances says, her voice hardening so she won’t cry, “and I will do anything I possibly can to prevent it.”

“I know you’ll try,” Annie says and Frances wants to scream at the top of her lungs and thrust her fist through the shining glass window nearby because she has a meeting with Otho Statler and two of his friends tonight and she has no idea what she can do to help Annie not ever have to go through this, and because Annie has already been through the arena and that’s already too much. And she can pray all she wants, but the world she lives in isn’t the one the gods and saints knew, they can’t possibly recognize it anymore.

Annie rubs her eyes, as if tired. She probably is. “Will you stay with me a while?” she asks.

“Of course I will,” Frances tells her, her voice quiet as she lies down next to Annie. As long as they allow me, she thinks. “As long as you want,” she says instead.

A few hours later, Frances wakes up, realizing she and Annie have been asleep for a few hours. She reaches over to the clock on the nightstand and sets the alarm for a few more hours, and closes her eyes and puts her arm around Annie again, Annie’s arm around her waist.

_

The celebration in the Capitol happens a few days afterwards. Frances wishes she could personally accompany Annie to the party at Snow’s mansion, but she doesn’t want Annie to be too associated with her, any more than she already is, in the eyes of the Capitol. It would make people too interested. People including the President.

(Cashmere and Enobaria had an idea of what was going on, and they’d both told her to do as they had- make the public think you’re friends because you’re Victors, and hopefully they won’t look too deep. Nothing escapes Snow’s notice, assume that he knows and have enough discretion that he would approve of. “It’s unfair, but it is what it is,” Enobaria had said.)

And so Frances and Delmar arrive together as the two mentors from this year’s victorious District Four, and no one mentions Isle. There is a time and place to mention the Victor’s fallen district partner, but celebrations, Frances has learned by now, are not considered the right place or time.

(“It doesn’t feel right to celebrate District Four when only one of us made it out,” Annie had said. Frances had told her she was right to feel that way, and wondered what it meant about her, that she hadn’t been nearly so moved by Dune’s death.)

Thankfully, it isn’t considered abnormal or subversive for Victors to be friends with one another, and thankfully, Victors from the same district are almost expected to have a certain closeness or at least an understanding. (This doesn’t stop Frances from fearing that if any of the patrons even see her exchange a single word with Annie, they’ll want Annie to come to their house next time, with Frances, or alone.)

Frances is wearing a mass of beaded green seaglass fastened to a transparent gauze slip of a dress, and green lips and eyes to match; while Delmar has been put in a blue suit with elaborate silver buttons shaped like starfish. He sighs before they enter together. “When they held mine,” he says, pausing in front of the door, “I was so hungry staring at all that food. But I couldn’t eat anything. I couldn’t bring myself to. Nothing,” he says, sounding drained. “It was a year before I could eat meals regularly.”

“Some things aren’t meant to be subsisted on,” Frances says with equal weariness, and they go in, and she can feel her pulse at her wrist pounding in fear for Annie.

She has a plan, she thinks, one that may very well work. But she knows well enough that she should never be confident in anything.

Annie looks lost at the center of the ballroom, surrounded by couples dancing to the loud music playing. She’s staring off into something that none of these Capitol people around her can even imagine. Annie’s stylists have put her in a black silk dress that shimmers against her dark skin, gray seashells dipped in silver for jewelry.

“I was wondering when you’d show up,” a voice behind them says, and Frances immediately recognizes the voice as Mags. She turns around and embraces her, thinking that she’d probably have died without Mags as a mentor, if only because she wouldn’t have given herself a chance. And because of that, she was there for Annie. Annie didn’t win because of Frances, but Frances supposes, all the same, maybe she is good for something, if she’s given Annie the support she needs. All the saints and gods know, Frances thinks, the world never gave Annie the support she deserved.

(Even Caesar Flickerman had been barely able to conceal his incredulousness at Annie’s victory when he interviewed her. It didn’t seem to faze Annie. Nothing he said did, like she wasn’t in conversation with him, but watching him from afar. “The ocean can take you anywhere, and so after a while, I wasn’t so afraid of it,” Annie had said, regarding her victory, and Caesar clearly hadn’t understood. But Frances thought she had an idea of what Annie was getting at.)

“Oh,” Mags says, “you’re all right, child, you’re all right.” Frances manages to pull herself together and smile for the cameras- she can’t see them, but they always end up finding her anyway. Mags raises her eyebrows sardonically. “Soon the photographers will want a group shot of us with Annie. I’ve spoken to her earlier, she seemed all right but slipped away from me…” Annie seems to be swaying along to the music alone. Some photographer has probably gotten a nice glamour shot of her like that. The Lone Victor, some of the news reports are calling her, even though some of the people are calling her the mad victor, the crazy girl from Four who won by mistake.

“Annie always liked music,” Frances finds herself saying. “We went to parties a lot when we were younger. She really enjoyed it.” She doesn’t say much else, not sure who’s listening, or what they’d make of what else she might have to say. Frances is practiced in keeping her mouth shut, and determined to not put any excess focus on Annie. It is a good thing, she supposes, that the former can possibly aid the latter.

The tempo of the music shifts to something faster, a harshly energetic song, and Annie closes her eyes and starts dancing. Her head circles around and thrashes forward and back, her shoulders moving separately. Her arms twist in the air, her wrists and fingers all moving in different directions. She sinks to her knees and leans backward, her head windmilling around, her earrings flying in the air, her hair in all directions. The crowd has circled around her, watching her, unsure what to do. Frances thinks Annie looks like she isn’t in the Capitol at all, as though she’s made herself believe they’re back home. She looks in command of the whole room. Annie’s eyes are closed throughout the whole dance, and then the song is over, and she gets up, rising to her feet slowly and gradually, tucking her long dangling earrings over her shoulders, carrying her high heeled shoes in her hands, walking towards Frances.

Annie smiles faintly, approaching her. “It’s strange that all of this is for me,” she says, “or. Well, you know what I mean,” Annie adds, because they both know none of this is for any of them, it never is.

“It was for me, too,” Frances tells her. “I remember when I was reaped the first thing I thought was that I was never meant to do anything in my life.” She laughs, because in a way she wasn’t wrong, and because sometimes laugh is all you can do. Annie looks at her understandingly.

“It almost doesn’t feel real,” Annie says. “But it should. And it always ends up feeling real again.” She’s quiet for a second. “I suppose it’s like that for you, too.” 

“You’re the realest person here,” Frances tells her, as quietly as she can manage.

Annie looks like she’s about to say something, but one of the reporters cuts her off. “Annie, darling!” he says like he knows her personally. If I have anything to say about it, you never will, Frances thinks, greeting him with fake excitement. “Now that was a unique performance from a very unique victor. Let me get a photo of you in that pretty dress!” Annie stands up straight and poses in a stance similar to her tribute photo, and the reporter says, well dear, not quite like that. And so Annie smiles a little, with her mouth closed, looking mysterious and elegant, her head tilted to one side as she only barely looks into the camera.

“That’s great,” the photographer says, and turns to Frances. “Sorry dear,” he says good naturedly, “not all the pictures can be of you. Most of them, though, most of them.” Frances laughs maniacally, like he’s the most hilarious person in the world, which enables him to laugh similarly at his own joke, the way she has so many times at this man’s home, alone with him or occasionally with his friends. It is sometimes easy to laugh around someone you hate. “Now one of the both of you. I don’t think any district has had two pretty girls in such close succession for a long time.”

Frances poses with Annie, opening her mouth suggestively, and imagines the damage she could do if she had a trident on her right now.

“I don’t like when they take my picture,” Annie says under her breath as he walks away. “Reminds me of being at the Home when they would take our identification pictures every year.”

“That’s exactly it,” Frances realizes, wondering how many lives she would have to live in order to have enough time to overcome the one she’s had. She wonders how none of these Capitol people can see it on her, or if she’s really that good at hiding it, and if that isn’t another way of being broken.

At least Annie isn’t, she thinks. These people can say whatever they want about Annie. They don’t understand her. They don’t deserve to.

“Would you like to go catch up with Mags and Delmar?” Annie asks. “It will probably be better for all of us if we’re in a crowd.” Just like the arena, Frances thinks. But Annie is right.

Frances looks around and makes sure to smile so that no Capitolite will look at her and think she’s anything but the airheaded, vain, but generally harmless (to them, at least) party girl they know her as, and if they’re distracted by her as they usually are, maybe they won’t look so much at Annie. Maybe they’ll decide that if Annie is mad, that isn’t very interesting or exciting or fun, less of a wild novelty and more of an unpleasant side effect of bringing district people into the Capitol, something to pretend they do not see. She hopes. If they’re not going to understand her, if they’re going to disservice who she is, hopefully, they won’t hurt her for years on end, they won’t make her be prey to remind her that was what she was before she became a Victor and that was what she would have died as if not for the Capitol’s generosity.

Annie leads Frances across the room to Mags and Delmar, and cameras flash, and the closer they get to the other side, the safer Frances feels, even as her pulse hammers away to the point where Annie stops and asks her if she is all right.

_

“My dear Miss Odair. Welcome,” President Snow says, smiling. It occurs to Frances that his accommodating mood might actually be genuine. Not only has Frances never caused him any trouble, she’s added untold amounts of wealth to his fortune. More than any of the other Victors. More than maybe anyone in the country.

If there was a way that all the money she’s given him could be given to the people in the districts to make things better for everyone, she thinks, maybe it wouldn’t feel so bad anymore. Maybe she would feel like a better person. Maybe she would be happier. Sometimes she thinks she wouldn’t be, though, and it makes her wonder what kind of a person she is.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” Frances says softly, drinking from the teacup placed before her to show her trust. She knows he could poison her easy as anything, but he’s not going to. The room smells of hot chamomile and of roses and of blood, and she knows the blood is from the wounds in his mouth. “I would like to thank you for creating such an honest environment where we can always be truthful with one another,” she says, flatly, but not dishonestly. The fact that he doesn’t lie to her, and doesn’t expect her to lie to him, actually does make things a lot more efficient, a lot more manageable. In a city where everything is a lie, at least she can be honest with the man who made her life this way, and he is honest in return. She’ll take it, if he’s giving it to her. People like him never give people like her anything, not really. She hates him, but in a way, she respects him for this, and hates herself for it.

“Hm,” the President says, as if considering her viewpoint anew. “Your frankness is one of the very interesting things about you, Frances. In a way, it’s very smart. You keep all the interesting things about you hidden.” Frances doesn’t know if that’s right, she’s never considered it that way before.

“Say I did, sir,” she says, “that way, the less people know about me.”

“Well,” says Snow, almost surprised. “With the amount of popularity you have here, sometimes I almost think you might have done very well for yourself had you been born Capitol, the fact that you are a young girl aside.”

“I don’t,” says Frances softly, taking a drink of the tea. “If it’s all right with you, I would like to talk about the subject that prompted me to request a meeting with you.”

“Of course,” the President says. “I have a very busy schedule and I’m sure in your own way you do too.” You have made very sure of that since I was fourteen, she thinks, but there’s no point in saying it.

Frances swallows hard, knowing how easy it would be to misstep, and have all the retaliation come to Annie. She remembers some time ago, Lyme from District Two saw her son go into the arena, and he died after being struck by lightning on the first day, and Enobaria had told Frances, “there’s a reason why things like this happen, and we all know him.”

“Well,” she begins falteringly, “it’s- it’s about Annie Cresta.” She refuses to let herself cry here. That would not help Annie at all. In fact, it might put her first on Snow’s kill list if Frances ever does anything wrong. “I-” it’s probably best to keep it as simple as possible, just the most basic statements, because who knows what Snow believes of Annie. And she doesn’t want to call Annie mad or insane or hysterical or any of those words. “I simply ask that Annie doesn’t have to see patrons the way I do. If anyone requests her I can, and would, go in her place, if you approved of the arrangement. Annie will still go on her Victory Tour as planned, and be a mentor, and she’ll continue honoring Panem as the great victor she is. But. I merely ask that she doesn’t have to do the sort of extra work that I have done. That’s all,” she says, making herself stop so she doesn’t keep talking and say anything that will dig any graves.

“You must care a great deal for Miss Cresta,” Snow says after a quiet, contemplative moment. She wonders what else he was thinking. She doesn’t want to know.

“Yes,” Frances says, barely able to speak. She doesn’t ask how much he knows about the two of them. She’s afraid to.

“Well, I’d say she’s very fortunate to have you,” Snow begins, and Frances isn’t going to let herself feel hope, not yet, but she wants to. “I would advise you to be careful, Miss Odair.”

She nods, wordlessly, waiting for him to confirm it, to just say it. He must enjoy this. He’s probably wondering if she’ll cry, which she just might if this takes any longer, or if she’ll beg, which she definitely came prepared to, just as long as it would get the job done. “I think your request is reasonable,” he says coldly. “People are very unsure about Miss Cresta. And we both know that people don’t waver when it comes to you. You are going to be very busy,” President Snow tells her. “I certainly hope you can get enough rest. Not getting enough rest makes work very difficult,” he tells her, as if he doesn’t think she knows.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” she says, dazed. “And I will keep what you said in mind. But I always make sure to rest well so I can be…present.”

“Do you,” he says. “So you’re feeling better than the last time we met?” A few months ago she’d shaken visibly during a television appearance, where Caesar Flickerman had been wearing an alligator-skin suit. She’d told him she wasn’t feeling well. President Snow had known better, and advised her to be careful.

His punishment had been to make her inaugurate the museum of her Games. She had to guide the tourist groups for the first week of its being open, and every day she walked the tour through the swamp arena, showing them the sites of all the events, holograms simulating the alligator mutts, screens all over the place replaying the deaths, and her kills. And she realized the person she had been before the cameras no longer existed, and in a way, she felt thankful to Snow, for making her realize that. For not lashing out on anyone she cared about, instead of just her.

“I am,” she says. It’s true. Now that he’s said she can go in place of Annie, she does feel better.

“You may go,” he says calmly. “Take care of yourself,” he says, as a warning. “And give my regards to Miss Cresta. Certainly she is tenacious. I can understand where you come from in your feelings towards her.” Frances forces herself to move, given that she’s been dismissed, and she says some words of gratitude she doesn’t remember a minute later and the next thing she knows she’s outside on the streets of the Capitol, shaking, unsure how she even got there or, at first, where she is.

_

The patron that night asks, “where is your friend, Annie? She was so lovely at that party yesterday, in a very unusual way you don’t really think of when you think of an attractive woman.” Frances wants Snow to poison him. She thinks she would be able to laugh about that with him, the way you can laugh with someone you hate.

“Oh,” she says giggling, “she’s all right. But girls like me get along better with men anyway,” she tells him as if letting him in on a secret.

She dreams she’s spearing him with his trident, screaming yes, yes, and he’s silent. She is covered head to toe with deep red blood, and Annie leads her to the ocean to clean herself off. The alligators swim around her but do nothing, because she’s one of them in a way, and Annie waves from the shore, smiling. But Frances, no matter how much she swims, doesn’t get any closer somehow.

The next day, Annie is going to go back to District Four. As Annie packs her bags, Frances goes to her room, and falls into her arms weeping so hard she doesn’t know if she’ll ever stop. “He said yes,” Frances manages to tell her, “you’re safe, you’re safe.”

“Oh,” Annie says, holding her closely, so closely, that Frances almost feels safe as well. “Oh, Frances.” Even Annie doesn’t know what to say, Frances realizes.

When she stops crying, she helps Annie finish packing for the train ride. She reapplies her makeup in the mirror so the cameras won’t see what her face looks like. She and Mags and Delmar all accompany Frances to the train station together, and they’re all going back to Four together, for now. And when the photographers take pictures, it’s of all of them, the Four from Four, and Frances can’t help but fear that even now, Annie still isn’t safe.

Annie looks out of the window on the ride back, looking at the world passing her by. Frances falls asleep with her head on Annie’s shoulder. It’s infinitely more comforting than whatever is out there. Against Annie, she feels good, as close to feeling good as she has in a while. 


	3. III

_“Jessica_

_has a forehead scar from_

_the deep end of a pool. I_

_ask Jessica what drowning_

_feels like and she says_

_not everything feels like_

_something else.”_ -

“Jessica gives me a chill pill,” Angie Sijun Lou

She’s back in District Four and the time has come, Frances thinks. So she goes to the first place where she might find any information, because she is never willingly stepping into the Family Home again. And she goes alone, because some things you have to do alone. This is for her to enter and deal with, and she’s not pulling anyone else into this. Maybe, in a way, the Games prepared her for this. To be able to stand up for herself, even if it’s too late, and if she knew how to years ago, it probably wouldn’t have done anything for her.

Her Uncle Cormac’s house looks the same- a gray stone cottage a few streets down from the shore, a green mailbox, gravel and sand surrounding the house. There’s a light on inside, she can see, and she walks up to the door and knocks.

He opens the door, and he looks mostly the same, but a little older. Everyone’s gotten older, she thinks. But maybe he just looks older because she isn’t used to seeing him. “Uncle Cormac,” she says, feeling much less of every emotion than she had thought she would. She is not very moved at all, maybe no more than he ever was by her. That should feel sadder to her than it does, probably.

“Frances,” he says, sounding almost startled, like she’d taken him off guard. Her face does not change. “It’s been a very long time.”

“Yes,” she says, “it has. Would you mind if I came in? I need to talk to you about something,” she tells him, barely waiting for the answer before she walks into his house. The same thick blue rug, the same dark wood paneled walls, the same faded District Four flag on the wall, unless it’s another one that’s faded in the many years since she’s been gone. She had the room at the end of the hall. The pink garland of dried flowers she’d kept around the doorknob is gone, probably went a long time ago.

“You never came to see us,” he says to her.

“You never came to see me,” she says, with no judgment or bitterness, with very little emotion at all, she realizes. He nods, and asks her if she wants anything to drink, and she says, no thank you.

“Mara,” calls her uncle, and then she comes in from her room, looking mostly the same, but with some gray in her hair. Aunt Mara stares at her in disbelief, looking her up and down. Frances had made sure not to dress very provocatively to not take any of the attention away from the point of her visit. Just a plain green linen dress with long sleeves and a hemline to her knees. She knows Aunt Mara would likely have loved it if she came wearing one of her more revealing outfits (at the most recent Victor’s celebration in the Capitol, her stylist had her wearing a long skirt and nothing on top, her hair wet like she’d been swimming and styled to cover just enough of her chest, which had started a trend among Capitolites) just so she could start something, but then, Mara never needed any reason to start something and Uncle Cormac had either never needed any reason to get involved or never noticed. And, she’s realizing, if he never noticed, she truly can’t understand how, and maybe she understands her own blood less than she understands her tormentors of the Capitol. 

“Wow,” Aunt Mara says, “it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” she smiles a little. Frances wonders why. Maybe Mara forgot everything. Maybe becoming a Victor has redeemed Frances in her eyes, but then, it probably hasn’t.

“It has,” Frances says, “which is why it’s long past time I came to ask about this.”

“We don’t have much money,” Uncle Cormac tells her uneasily.

“No,” Frances says firmly, “that wasn’t it.” Mara raises her eyebrows in an expression Frances does not understand. “I came to ask where my mother is currently living.” Mara turns her head to look at Cormac, almost in disbelief.

“We don’t regularly speak with Maeve,” her uncle begins.

“That wasn’t what I was asking,” Frances says stiffly.

“That wasn’t what you were asking?” Mara cuts in, narrowing her eyes. “You should show some more respect to your uncle. You don’t come all these years and now you come here for this, like you don’t even care about him.”

“All right, Mara,” Cormac says blandly. “I know what you’re saying, but I just wanted to tell her we aren’t…very close with her mother. Just so she knows that.”

“Yes, I understand,” Frances says evenly, “in fact, I’m not surprised at all.” Mara opens her mouth to start to say something and Cormac looks shocked, and Frances realized she’d never talked back in any way at all to him before, she barely spoke unless she was spoken to as a child. But no one has seen her as a child for a very long time.

“And you know something?” she looks at Mara now. “In a way you were right about me. After what my life experience has been, I’m not going to deny that it’s helped make me what I am,” Frances says, realizing she sounds so distant, despite the fire of her words. “I came from a bad home. The both of you made sure of that, and then you sent me to another bad home. I have done a lot of very bad things in my life. I am trouble. And the whole world knows that I am a whore.” Cormac looks stunned, like she’s spoken another language. Mara just looks angry, but like she wants Frances to keep speaking, like she’s thinking, go ahead and dig your own grave. But Frances has survived twenty-three other children fighting for their lives and so, so many assailants in the Capitol. She is no longer afraid of her aunt. “That’s not all I am,” she says, thinking of how Annie and Mags and Delmar and Cashmere and Enobaria would want her to think this, even if sometimes she doesn’t. “But I’m not going to deny what I am. So you can say whatever you like about me. I came to ask where my mother is and all you have to do is tell me, and then you’ll never have to see me in your house again.” She is sitting up in the chair, her back straight as a razor, like a Career tribute volunteering at the Reaping.

Cormac gets out a pen and starts writing down what she assumes is contact information.

Why did you do all those things to me? She wants to ask her aunt, just as she wants to ask her uncle, why didn’t you ever help me? Did you just hate me because of my mother or was it something about me that didn’t have to do with her? Why didn’t you just send me away to the Home earlier if you didn’t want me around? She thinks of all these questions, and knows it would be pointless to ask any of them. She would never receive a satisfactory answer, because her uncle and aunt would never really listen to her, because they never have, and so anything she asks about what they did to her would barely register to them as something they were responsible for.

Frances wonders what it is about her that makes people want to harm her. 

Mara scoffs. “You turned out to be a real piece of work,” she says, “and you seem really proud of it too.”

“I’m not proud of it,” Frances answers. “I just don’t hide from it.” You were right, Amber, she thinks. No hiding for me.

“Go find your mother,” Mara says, her voice tinged with mocking. “You and her both know how to start shit better than anyone.” Cormac hands over the paper.

“This could have been a lot easier, Frances,” he tells her, disappointed.

Maybe a long time ago, she thinks, and even then, who knows. “No,” she says, looking at him with a sudden clarity, “I don’t think it could have.” She puts the paper in her pocket and walks out of the room, out of the house, closing the door behind her. As she leaves, she can already her Mara and Cormac talking, but she doesn’t try to make out what they’re saying. 

_

When her mother answers the door, Frances thinks for a moment it’s possible she doesn’t recognize her. But it’s not that. Her mother is just surprised.

“…Frances?” says Maeve Odair, sounding almost confused, and in her mind Frances thanks Brigid and every other saint and god she can think of, because her mother looks healthy. Not the shiny-perfect falseness of well-to-do Capitolites, but genuine health. Her eyes are clear, and Frances can see that her mother’s arms, in her sleeveless shirt, have no marks on them. It’s all she can do to not fall on her knees.

She starts crying, at first not even realizing it. “I prayed for you,” she tells her mother, “I worried I’d never see you again, I’ve thought of you every day since they took me away from you even when I was in-” but her mother is helping her walk inside the house, drawing her arms around her, telling her it’s all right. Frances vaguely thinks she should be the one saying that. Shouldn’t she be apologizing, too? For making her into the mother of a killer? For not coming the second she came of age, for not making Snow break this one rule for her since she’s been more of a loyal assistant to him for longer than anyone in his cabinet so wouldn’t he have to take that one request? For not trying harder, for turning into the person she is, someone who no one would want their daughter to be?

Sometimes – Frances remembers her conversation with Lupine Gears and thinks the only reason she hasn’t just let the morphling kill her by now is because she knows what Snow would do. 

Her mother lets her rest her head in her lap the way she used to do when she was a kid and her mother was watching the television on the couch and Frances was with her and got tired. “It’s okay,” her mother says, softly, “you’re home now. You’re finally home.” And Frances believes her. 

“You’re all right,” Frances is saying even though she’s not sure if her mother can hear or not.

_

In Frances’ house in the Victors’ Village, she is looking out the window of the living room while her mother watches some fashion program on the television. Her mother still has her own house, but stays over and visits often. Frances has told her mother she’s welcome to come whenever she likes and to consider this her home, too. But her mother hasn’t given up her house, and she understands that. She was either too young or not present to completely understand everything her mother went through, but she can understand that her mother wouldn’t give up owning her own place to live after everything she’d gone through. After all, Frances’ house in the Village was, technically, given to her, and things that are given to you by people like the President and the game makers are never really yours.

She likes her house in the Village, but she knows it’s not really her home, not any more than her mother considers this place home. Home is the District. Where the ocean is. Where she has a say in where she can go, as much as she can, in this world.

“Oh, that’s back?” her mother says, looking at the television, pointing out one of the latest trends in the Capitol, fishnet stockings. “When I was your age every girl in Four dressed like that if she wanted to look stylish. Now it’s finally made it to the Capitol.” She pauses for a moment. “I suppose two girls from Four winning would make them pay attention,” she says, her tone thoughtful, as if she wants to say more.

“Oh, they certainly do pay attention now,” Frances says wryly. Her mother is quiet for a while and goes back to watching the television, which Frances is really only half-paying attention to, her attention span is all over the place at the moment and she’s content to just be here with her mother, it’s still so new, to be able to do so.

“I was better. By the time you were in the Games. I was watching and I meant what I said when they interviewed me, I don’t know if you saw it-” her mother says, the sentences distanced from one another, her voice faraway.

“I did see it,” Frances says reassuringly. She wonders if her mother doesn’t know that the Home told her how she tried to get custody back, if it would be a bad idea to bring it up right now. “It…it meant a lot to me, to see that when I came out.”

“I’m so sorry, Frances. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life and I know I could have done better. I could have been there for you. But I wasn’t and-” her mother puts her hands over her forehead for a moment. “I want you to know,” she says, looking directly at Frances. “I don’t judge you for what you had to do in there. You were just fourteen years old and you had to survive. You’re still my daughter.”

The idea of neither of them judging the other crosses Frances’ mind- because no matter how much her mother apologizes, no matter what her childhood memories bring up, she can’t bring herself to resent her mother or blame her at all. It feels so nice, like something neither of them are supposed to have.

“And you’re still my mother,” Frances says, “You never…did anything bad to me. You were never violent, and just because some people are when they get sick like you were, doesn’t mean you were. Even when you weren’t around and I had to be with Grandmother, I was safe. And when I had to be with Cormac and Mara or in the Home…nothing that happened there was something you did. You can’t blame yourself for what other people did to me.”

“I don’t, Frances,” her mother says. “You shouldn’t hate yourself so much either.”

Frances doesn’t ask what she means by that.

_

It’s early autumn, and the weather is slightly cooler, and Annie’s Tour is over and the Capitol doesn’t have any special events involving her in mind. Not like they do for Frances, but as long as it’s not the summer, she spends more time in Four than in the Capitol, if you count the days. She always reminds herself of that. It sometimes helps.

Annie wears the sort of practical, layered clothing that some of the older fishing crews wear, and on more formal occasions, long woolen skirts and oversized knit sweaters and sometimes a driftwood necklace made by Delmar. Frances thinks she always looks so beautiful, so ethereal and purely herself, that looking at her just makes her happy. The Capitol wouldn’t agree with her- but that’s for the best most of the time, isn’t it.

And so if they have no obligations to the Capitol, there is nothing stopping Frances from staying the night at Annie’s house in the Village and sleeping in her bed and staying until late in the morning, even after Annie has woken up, though sometimes Annie stays with her, despite the fact that she usually gets up earlier.

Most nights, one or both of them will wake up. Often, one or both of them sleep very badly. But they have one another, which makes it manageable.

No one is going to take that from them.

_

For Games season, in the Capitol, Frances decides to make some money, since it’s being offered. The Vixen Victors annual calendar photoshoot is going on right now, as it usually happens in the summer, and the copies are distributed to be sold all around Panem for affordable prices. It’s very popular, and can probably bring in enough to do much more than just pay off her mother’s medical debts.

They photograph her as Miss June, in a studio full of clear, shining water, sitting on a rock with a mermaid tail costume, her hair braided back and sparkling all the colors of the sea, her chest bare. It’s uninspired but better than what they gave Cashmere, who had to wear white fur lingerie in a freezing room filled with ice blocks and manufactured snow, as Miss January. She’d gotten a bad cold that lasted a week. (“First they try to kill me in a rainforest, now a fucking blizzard,” she’d rolled her eyes.)

Frances gives the check to her mother when she gets back home. “Here,” she says quietly, slipping her the paper. Even if she doesn’t tell her now, eventually when year ends, her mother will probably hear about it from one of her coworkers at the fishmarket or something. She doesn’t know how to feel about this, given her mother’s unjudgmental attitude, and the fact that she doesn’t think she’s grown up to be very different from her mother after all. If it was someone else, she wouldn’t feel good at all, would have to force herself to look them in the eye, even if she knew they’d never judge her. For so much of her life, she’d been told ending up like her mother was the worst thing that could happen to her, but that it would likely happen to her anyway no matter what she did.

Frances had learned that there were a great many horrible things that could happen to her, things the people who had taught her to hate herself couldn’t have even imagined.

“Frances, I – thank you, but how did you get this?” her mother asks, embracing her. “Are they paying you to be a mentor?”

No, they don’t pay you, she thinks, you pay and you never stop. “No,” she said, “I just did a job for them. A modeling job,” she says, uncomfortably, not wanting to have to explain it and realizing she could have said it differently, given how much her mother likes to watch the fashion programs, she might be interested in asking more.

Her mother just smiles at her. “I always knew you’d be so pretty when you grew up,” she says, and Frances usually feels her blood run cold and her muscles tense when someone calls her pretty, and she almost wants to tell her mother, I wish I wasn’t, but strangely, it feels nice, to have her mother say this to her. Like the way she looks is all right and not something that makes her at fault for everything.

“Well,” her mother says, “don’t work too hard. I can’t have you paying for everything,” she says, and smiles.

“All right, mom,” Frances says. “I think Annie is going to come over soon, would you like to stay and see her?”

“Of course I would,” her mother says. Frances is grateful that her mother and Annie seem to like each other, and that when Annie covers up her ears or laughs seemingly out of nowhere, her mother doesn’t pry or say rude things. “I’m very glad you have a good friend in your life. You were always so lonely when you were a child.”

Frances sometimes still feels lonely. There is nothing to remind her of how alone she sometimes is quite like being surrounded by people, or being intimate with someone, when she is in the Capitol. She has a bad feeling that her mother will soon see her life clearer, and then she may not be so proud of Frances anymore.

“Good thing those days are over, then,” Frances says, putting on a lighthearted tone, reminding herself that in some ways, they are.

_ 

Johanna Mason from Seven is the Victor this time around, and for her Victory Tour, it’s Frances’ turn to host for the Four stop. Last year, it had been Delmar’s turn, and he had barely been able to conceal his discomfort as Capitol reporters walked through his house to do magazine spreads on his furniture and décor. “Even when they’re not trying to,” he’d told her afterwards, “it’s like they always have to tell us everything we have is theirs.”

She doesn’t mind hosting, she supposes, and Annie says she’d like to be there for it- she doesn’t always come for these things. Sometimes all the noise bothers her and she puts her hands over her ears and closes her eyes like her head is hurting her.

“She’s a little like me, I guess,” Annie says. “No one expected us to live. We weren’t what anyone expected. In a way we proved everyone wrong.” She smiles wryly. “’Accidental Victor,’” she says in a mock-Capitol accent, repeating what so many have said about her, but her eyes are worn out and there’s no fun had in her imitation. “No one treads water and stays in the same place nonstop for three days and nights,” she says, exhaling. 

Frances supposes she’s happy. It’s an event related to the Games but neither she nor Annie have to go to the Capitol, both her mother and Mags are going to be there, and the attention will mostly be on the new Victor. Which isn’t fair of her to be so relieved about, but it’s just for this one event, who knows what will happen afterwards.

Frances thinks she might like to get to know Johanna, although there’s no guarantee Johanna will want to know her in return. But when you’re Victors, you inevitably get to know each other on some level or another.

Annie is dressed in a navy cable-knit sweater to suit the cool evening, but Frances is dressed for the cameras, a barely-there shimmering blue shirt with fishnet sleeves, a flowing skirt of similar material, and no shoes. Her mother and Mags can dress how they like, at least. The door of the Victor’s Village house is open, and when the car with Johanna in it arrives, the back door opens while the car is still slowing down, and out jumps Johanna Mason before the camera crews in the nearby cars can film her.

Frances thinks she’s going to like her.

“Hello everyone!” Frances calls out as breathily as possible when the cameras arrive. “I’m so happy to welcome our newest Victor, Johanna Mason, to District Four! Johanna, how are you liking it here?” she asks, wondering if Johanna can tell how fake her voice is. Johanna was also playing a role during her Games. Frances wonders if she’ll still be acting. But then, of course, she probably will be.

“Well, it’s very nice here. Of course, I don’t like it as much as Seven,” she says with a sharp wit as she enters the house. She has one of those closed-mouth smiles where a few of her side teeth poke out, and the green streak in her brown hair looks like she did it herself, rather than with the help of stylists.

“This is all just so weird,” Johanna says to Frances and Annie later, when everyone is distracted by Johanna’s Capitol escort telling a story about the Games midnight afterparty he’d attended when Johanna won. “Do you ever get used to this?” Johanna asks, spearing a few fried scallops on a fork.

“Not really,” Annie says. “Sometimes it just doesn’t even feel real. In a way, I don’t really think it is,” she says, staring off towards one of the walls. She’s looking through one of the windows at the setting sun when she asks Johanna, “Do you know what I mean?”

Johanna shoots a confused look to Frances, and says, “I guess.” Frances wonders how it felt to Johanna. Pretending to be afraid, pretending to barely know how to point a knife in the right direction, and then taking out all the remaining tributes with her axe in a day once she made it to the Final Eight. Telling Caesar Flickerman and Claudius Templesmith and all the magazines that of course it was a ruse, and she didn’t understand how the others couldn’t figure that out, she was from District Seven, of course she knew an axe like her own hand. (“Come on, Caesar,” Johanna had said in her green velvet dress and silver pinecone earrings when she’d had her post-Victory interview, “you all really believed that? Well, I guess I can’t complain.” The audience had loved that. Frances always worries when the audience seems to really love a Victor.)

“I know it’s hard,” Frances says under her breath, looking towards Johanna. “If you stay by the people who care about you, though…it helps you keep perspective.”

Johanna looks like she wants to say she already knows that, but she gives Frances a half-smile anyway. “Where can I get more of this seaweed beer?”

“Well,” Frances says, “Annie and I can show you to the kitchen. We have more in there and…we don’t really have any people watching in there.”

“I love this bitch,” Johanna says, clapping Annie on the shoulder, and they all laugh.

_

The year Mags has to be hospitalized for her (thank Brigid, thank the Magdala, thank the Morrigna, thank Patrick the Saint, thank everyone she can think of) non-fatal stroke, and Delmar is sent to accompany her to the hospital and back home to make sure she’s healing all right (Frances wishes it could have been her), Frances has to mentor both the District Four tributes. All she can think of half the time is Mags, even though she knows Mags will be okay. Even her mother has telephoned her and promised to visit Mags if it would make her feel better.

They deserve real Victors like Mags and Delmar, she thinks before she even knows who her tributes will be, not some fluke like me who only won because all the perverts in the Capitol sent me gifts. Youngest Victor ever, and why? That was why.

Sometimes that’s what she thinks of her win, something she didn’t even earn on her own. Years of being told to be grateful for this sponsor’s generosity and that patron’s kindness has often made her doubt her own abilities.

The girl is fifteen and apathetic-looking, named Abalone. The boy is just thirteen, his name Pacifico. _If you win, you’ll be the youngest Victor in history_ , Caesar Flickerman says while interviewing Pacifico, who looks like he’s only now realized this, and Frances wants to run onstage and drag him off and put him back on the train to Four and keep him safe. But she can’t. She can’t do anything, not even ensure that no one will ever break her record and no one else will ever have to be the youngest Victor in history.

“I asked you a question,” Abalone says, sounding disappointed, in training, and Frances hadn’t realized she’d zoned out again. Sometimes she doesn’t even know that she’s doing it, or for how long. Annie helps her with it, tells her what she missed. But Annie isn’t here.

“I’m sorry,” Frances tells her.

“It’s okay,” Pacifico tells her, smiling, and Abalone looks at him blankly, as if to question why he’s saying that.

“You’re really different from how you are on television. Even in your Games. You’re like a different person,” Abalone says as if this is mildly interesting to her, but not much more.

“You’re right,” Frances says. “Would you like to go over throwing the trident at targets again?”

“Whatever,” Abalone says lightly, and Pacifico excitedly says _oh yeah!_ , and both responses hurt to hear, and Frances gets one of the practice tridents, one that’s nowhere near as high quality as the one given to her in the arena. 

When Theodosius, the boy from Two, wins and comes to Four on his Victory Tour and tentatively reads off his cards that it was an honor to fight among the tributes of Four, Frances can feel the saltwater in her eyes. Pacifico had almost, almost made it out of the Cornucopia bloodbath, and Abalone was the last girl in the Career pack standing, and she wonders if she’s crying because they died or because if they lived they would have ended up like her, and realizes she’s mourning the lives they were given and the lives they were never going to be able to have. It wouldn’t do for her to cry on camera, so she makes herself stop. But she thanks Theodosius as sincerely as she can, and sees his old, old eyes in his young face.

At night she can’t sleep, and she rests her head on Annie’s pillow, so that they are essentially on the same side of the bed. “I’ll never be able to protect any of them,” she says to Annie, “win or lose.” She cries into the pillow as Annie lies down and wraps her arms around her and kisses her salty cheek.

“It isn’t your fault,” Annie whispers, and Frances hadn’t exactly said she thought it was, but she’d came close to it. She’s Snow’s number one Victor, after all. How much money has she made him so he can keep this going?

“Something has to be,” Frances says, finally. “Something has to be, or I wouldn’t feel like it was.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Annie tells her. “Just because something feels a certain way, doesn’t mean it is. Remember when I was in the water, and I said it felt like it wasn’t real. But I knew it was. Just because this all feels like your fault, doesn’t mean it is.”

“I could have helped them better than I did,” Frances wipes at her eyes, looking at Annie. “If I was good for anything wouldn’t one of them had lived?”

Annie looks down pensively. “None of us are really supposed to live,” she says. “The Victors, we’re just for show.” She puts her hand on Frances’ face. “And I blamed myself when Isle died for a while. Until I realized that was probably what they would have wanted me to think, just as if he lived and I died, they would have wanted him to blame himself, or even another tribute, rather than…” she gives a sad smile. “Well, you know.”

Frances gets herself upward enough to put her forehead against Annie’s, put her arms around her shoulders. She’s steady, and warm, and her hair smells like salt and the seaweed scented soap that’s always in her house. She smells like home, like District Four, like the ocean that reaches out to the horizon like a road around the whole world. Like the opposite of the Capitol and the scents Frances ends up covered in there.

She kisses Annie’s neck, and Annie brings up the covers around the both of them, and Frances undoes the buttons on her nightshirt and Annie leans forward into her, and she isn’t crying anymore, she wonders how anyone who knows Annie wouldn’t fall in love with her.

“I’m here, _im ser_ ,” Annie tells her.

“You are,” Frances says breathlessly. That is real, she thinks, it is real, and good, and sometimes things are both, and in the nights in District Four when no one is awake and no one is filming, Annie and Frances are both freer and safer than they’ve ever been.

_

The year of the 74th Games, Frances is to mentor a girl named Marina Kyrkos. Marina wasn’t a volunteer, and she didn’t go to any of the academy programs, but she made it clear that she has years of physical skills and in that sense, she’s been in training for a while. She is tall, and strong, and knows how to use her strength. There’s a hardness in her young eyes, her jaw set, her face stonelike. In a way, she reminds Frances of Johanna.

Frances walks into the Training Center the morning after a long and horrible night, horribly bruised and scraped with not enough time to go into remake despite what her frantic prep team wanted, and Marina looks her up and down, and Frances has the uncomfortable feeling that Marina can see right into her. 

“Training mishap,” she says blandly to Marina. There’s a chance Marina will never need to know the truth, she thinks, but knows she can’t be that convincing. “Cashmere got me good. Glimmer might be your greatest ally _and_ your worst enemy in there.” She even smiles, despite the fact that it hurts her mouth.

Marina is quiet for a second, staring at her with an unnerving intensity. Her silence doesn’t last long. “I’m going to tell you something,” she says, her voice guarded and low. Frances nods her head as if she’s the tribute and Marina is the mentor, but then, she’s been a mentor long enough to know that sometimes you can learn a lot from tributes.

“So I grew up with my mom. My mom and a list of her shithead boyfriends,” Marina says, her words venomous but her tone relatively unmoved. Her eyes are cold with anger, though. “The last one, he starts beating her while we were having dinner. I mean a lot of them beat her, and me too, but this was more recent, and he was doing it really bad. I said, hey, you’re going to kill her. He said, shut up, you dumb bitch. So I took one of the chairs from the kitchen table and lifted it, wasn’t even that heavy, and slammed it over his head. Then he went down and I stomped on his chest. Again and again. I took the knife from my plate and put it to his throat and said I don’t have nothing to lose and I don’t care. My mom started screaming at me to stop because what if the Peacekeepers come and take me. I didn’t tell her I wasn’t afraid of that. Only thing I’m afraid of is ending up like her. But you can’t say that without sounding like you’re blaming her, or like I hate her or something, you know,” Marina says, gesturing with her hand. “Anyway. We never saw him again but it took a real long time for her bruises to go away and she’s gonna have that scar on her shoulder until she dies. My point is I’m not dumb,” Marina finishes, looking at Frances with such honesty and understanding, she can only describe her expression as pure, and Frances doesn’t want to have to send this girl into the arena, she can barely look this girl in the eye knowing that Marina already knows enough of the harsher truths of the world to feel that fighting through life is the only option there is other than getting beaten down.

Frances closes her eyes, nodding her head. “No,” she says apologetically, “you’re not, Marina. Not at all. In fact, I think you’re smart enough to win.” Marina almost smiles. “And if there’s anything you want help with that you’re not sure I can assist you with, you should feel free to ask me anyway. But also…Delmar would be happy to help you as well.” She has to say that, she thinks. Marina doesn’t want Frances to be her only option, and that’s probably reasonable of her. Frances sees there is pity in Marina’s eyes, and maybe a little horror. 

She was only ever good at fighting back in the Games. This would never be enough for Marina, even if Frances does think there’s a chance she can win. Frances can only fail Marina as a mentor, regardless of whether or not Marina becomes the Victor. Because Marina is less afraid of both killing and dying than she is of the possibility of ever ending up like Frances.

Marina excels in the Cornucopia, slaying tributes with her sword and shoving them onto the grass and grabbing supplies, shouting at the air like a war-cry. She has Brutus’ pure strength and Johanna’s fiery rage and Delmar’s bright precision and maybe, just maybe a little bit of Frances’ death-grip on her own survival. She doesn’t exactly look like she is enjoying herself, but Frances thinks in a way, Marina is finding some kind of catharsis. The realization just makes her sad. And she realizes she can see some of herself in Marina, and there’s something wrong with this world where girls like her feel like they need to overcome the cycles of their violent lives by controlling the violence instead of escaping it, because there is no escape.

On the first night, when Glimmer shakes Marina’s shoulder and tells her it’s her turn to keep watch, Marina smiles crookedly and asks, “how do you trust me not to kill everyone in your sleep?”

Glimmer gives a short, almost quiet laugh. Perhaps, Frances thinks, this is how she laughs when she gets to be herself; if she’s the Victor, this is how she’ll laugh when she’s in One, but never in the Capitol. “Because, Four. That’s just not your style,” she says. “You love fighting too much for that. Maybe more than any of us,” she says, lying down on a pillow made of leaves. Frances wonders if Glimmer knows how right she is. Marina seems to stare off and silently consider that, shrugging.

“All right. Rest easy then, One,” Marina says, and her eyes turn fierce as she begins her watch.

On the fifth day of the Games, Glimmer dies grotesquely and is barely recognizable after the tracker jackers are done with her and no one comes back for her when she screams, and Marina is barely conscious when she dies, between life and death, lying on the ground with a thousand stings in her, and the boy from Twelve kills her in what she thinks may have been intended as mercy.

She hates herself for the part of her that feels thankful that neither of them will have to live as Victors, the part of her that feels like this every year for so many of the tributes. But more than that, she hates the world for making death feel merciful, and life feel like prolonged dying. Both those dead girls, punctured a thousand times by unnatural creatures created in a lab, deserved better than having their options be to die or hate every moment of surviving. They all deserve better, all these tributes, all the Victors, Frances thinks. Maybe even her.

She doesn’t know how Mags has been able to stand it for this long. Frances thinks without Annie, she never would have been able to stand it in the first place. 

They all deserve a better world, but there’s nothing to be done about this one. That might be the worst part, Frances thinks. And so she calls up Johanna, whose tribute died at the Cornucopia bloodbath, and asks if she wants to go get a drink or two.

“Why the fuck not,” Johanna says, and makes some old joke about District Four Gaels and alcohol which Frances would probably find offensive if it wasn’t Johanna saying it, and Frances knows there won’t be a bar in town that doesn’t have the Games broadcasted on all its televisions, but at least she’ll be able to just get through it with a friend who understands.

_

“I don’t think I’m a good person,” Frances tells Johanna, staring at the eerily smooth roads, as they walk to a bar together taking the longer route, on less busy streets. They know all the shortcuts. Frances had been thinking about how useful it was when Johanna had said _I wish I didn’t know so much about this fucking place._

Frances sometimes thinks the only way she can stand it is learning as much as she can about it.

Johanna shrugs. “Don’t let that get to you,” she says. “Besides. I think we both know what bad people are by now.” 

Frances considers this. Sometimes she wonders how Johanna puts up with her, how she doesn’t hate her, how she doesn’t shake her by the shoulders and scream at her _, just stand up for yourself for once in your life_.

“Yeah,” Frances exhales, “I suppose you’re right about that.” She often forgets that Johanna is younger than her.

“Of course I am,” Johanna says, smiling sharply, and they both laugh as if they have occasion to.

“Hey Johanna,” Frances says quietly, after a moment.

“Yeah,” she says, her footsteps coming down hard on the ground.

“When you go back….take care of yourself,” Frances says. She never knows how to ask if Johanna is all right, because really, what kind of question is that to ask in the first place. Of course she isn’t, even if she deals with it better than Frances would ever know how to. She knows Johanna doesn’t want people calling attention to what she’s gone through and feeling sorry for her. It’s not that Frances pities Johanna. It’s that she feels concern for her because sometimes she thinks no one else does, and no one has since her family was killed. And she can’t imagine how alone Johanna must be in Seven.

Johanna puts her hand on Frances’ shoulder, walking just a step ahead of her. “All right,” she says, “and you should do the same.” 

_

At a club where all the lights are neon pink, Cashmere, a flamingo-colored version of herself, walks toward Frances, who is leaning up against the shimmering wall. “Enobaria told me you were taking this real hard,” she says, understandingly. It had to have been the other night, Frances realizes. She had to go to some party and the Capitol guests were all talking about the tracker jackers and she’d gone into the restroom to calm herself down and Enobaria had been there, cleaning out her teeth, for what was at least the tenth time that day, Frances supposes. Enobaria and Frances always run into each other like that. Sometimes you just have to get away as much as you can. They understand that in each other.

“Yeah,” Frances says quietly, or as quietly as she can speak so that Cashmere can still hear her over the blaring music. “I was just thinking…at least they weren’t alone, you know?” She tries not to let her voice break. “Our tributes.” Well, they were, and both of them know that. They were separated by enough distance that they were in the world of pain and hallucinations and maybe wouldn’t have known the other was there. But the world saw them fall together. Maybe wherever they are now, they know that they went down together, too.

Cashmere nods, sadness in her face. The television on the other side of the club is broadcasting the Games. She doesn’t want to see it. “They kept saying she looked like she could be my younger sister,” she says, a sort of anger in her shaking voice. It was true. Glimmer looked so much like Cashmere had when she was newly a Victor. Cashmere lowers her head and closes her eyes, rubbing her temples, and then straightens herself up and opens them again, sighing.

“You did what you could, kitten,” Cashmere tells her, putting her hand on her shoulder. “Sometimes it’s all you can do.” Frances nods her head vacantly, and closes her eyes, her head aching with the combination of the stress and the glaring lights and the piercingly loud music. She leans her head against Cashmere’s shoulder, and Cashmere lets her. (She can already imagine the headline- Even Party Girls Need Rest. There have been worse headlines.)

Frances wants to tell Cashmere she wants to do more than just whatever she can manage, and she thinks Cashmere would say she feels the same way. She wonders if they’ll ever be able to do more than that.

_

Everyone had been surprised when the rules of the Games were switched, and there are two Victors, Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark of Twelve. Frances had been in the Capitol and Annie in Four, but a few months later, they’re both been reunited, and talk about it over dinner while watching the news, announcements for the upcoming Victory Tour.

“If that rule had always existed…” Annie whispers, “maybe there’s a chance Isle wouldn’t be dead. Who knows.”

If it had always existed, Frances supposes Dune would still have died the first day, and Amber would have been even more crazed with vengeance because there was a chance both her and Ermine could have made it out, and probably not much would have changed for Frances. She doesn’t tell Annie that she thinks if the rule had always existed, then most of the time there would still be one tribute, because that’s the bare minimum the Capitol gives the tributes and they don’t like to give more than that. So she just says, “well, I hope these two have a chance.”

After all, if the Capitol wants them to be the star-crossed lovers of Twelve, maybe they’ll allow them to stay in each other’s company. Even if their relationship is a lie, which some of the other Victors suspect. “I wouldn’t blame them,” Annie says, “no one wants their district partner to die.”

“It’s actually a very smart plan,” Frances agrees. “Which does make me worry for them.”

Annie frowns and looks at the floor. “Right,” she says. “Maybe they let them both win on purpose, then. To show them they only managed to do it because they were allowed.”

Or maybe, Frances wonders, Snow is just waiting to strike back at them.

Neither of them had watched the end of the Games. Annie told Frances that she went into her bedroom and covered her ears when those mutts attacked Cato. Frances had been with a particularly violent patron, whose television was on. She’d heard Cato’s horrible screams all night long. By the time it was all over, she’d gone back to her hotel room, took a sleeping pill, and slept through the dramatic end and the historic declaration of the two Victors. She’d dreamed of Cato screaming, and Ermine screaming, until they both were the same person. She’d woken up wondering if Katniss and Peeta have the same dreams.

A reporter asked her where she was when she saw the Games ending, and she’d laughed and winked at the camera and lowered her voice and said she was in bed.

Frances doesn’t tell anyone, even Annie, this part.

_

When Frances is summoned to the Capitol during their celebrations for the finale of the Victory Tour, she packs her bags and takes the train efficiently and unquestioningly, as she always does. She’s so busy she doesn’t even get a chance to talk to the new Victors in person, although she does make appearances at some of their events.

On her third day in the Capitol, she goes to the house of Plutarch Heavensbee, a formerly assistant game maker who Snow has recently promoted after the “unavailability” (so, poisoning, she can only assume) of Seneca Crane. He’s a middle aged man with fair hair and unreadable eyes, and he looks like he’s thinking about something secret.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Heavensbee,” she says, raising her voice to a higher octave and wondering why this man wants to do this at two in the afternoon, and if she’ll be able to get to her appointment with Otho Statler tonight on time.

“No, Frances,” Plutarch Heavensbee says, shaking his head. “I have something very different in mind, and I think you’re going to be very interested in hearing about what it is,” he says evenly.

Frances doesn’t say anything. “No one is listening,” he says. “Your family, Mags, Annie. They’re safe. You can trust me.” That doesn’t mean much, considering Frances _trusts_ Snow and everyone in this awful city to do what they always do. But she doesn’t walk out just yet.

“What do you mean, Mr. Heavensbee?” she asks.

“Please just call me Plutarch,” he says, and then folds his hands on his desk. “I know you can keep secrets, which is good. Because you’re certainly going to want to hear the secrets I have to tell you about District Thirteen,” he says.

“Excuse me?” she says blankly after a moment of confusion.

“Yes, Frances,” he says. “You heard me correctly. Now,” he says, “if you were offered the chance to be part of the rebellion that ended the Capitol’s tyranny, the Games, Snow’s rule, once and for all, would I be correct in assuming you’d been waiting for it your whole life?”

_

Frances takes Annie out into the ocean to swim, so no one can hear them talk, and she explains to her what she’d learned from Plutarch Heavensbee.

Annie seems to stare off into the ocean for a while, treading water and observing keenly as if she’s waiting for something, until she speaks. “I knew it,” she says in quiet elation. Annie looks sideways toward Frances, her hair trailing in the ocean behind her. “I mean…Not about Thirteen specifically. But I knew there was more out there. If Thirteen is still there, then there must be other places in the world that are still there, too.” Annie’s hands are on Frances’ shoulders, their faces close enough to touch.

“If you could,” Frances asks, realizing it as a genuine possibility for the first time, “would you want to leave?”

Annie’s eyes stare vacantly out beyond the horizon for a moment, and for a moment she seems to be somewhere else. Before Frances can say anything, though, Annie answers. “I’m not going to leave you. Don’t worry about that”, she says softly and Frances feels like a weight has been taken off her chest. She also wonders if she is being unfair, if she is holding Annie back.

“I don’t really think I would leave for good,” Annie says. “I can’t really see myself leaving Four. And if things…are different enough soon,” Annie continues, “there may not really be a reason to want to leave. But there wouldn’t be anything stopping us from knowing the truth about the rest of the world.” Annie looks down at the surface of the water for a moment, and Frances wonders what she sees when she looks into the ocean. “It wasn’t that I just wanted to leave, exactly. I wanted to be able to know what the world I live in is like. To be able to go places freely. To live in a world where I never have to not say something, or hide something, because it’s in a language that isn’t allowed to exist anymore.”

Frances wants to promise that she’ll do anything she can to help make sure Annie will be able to see that world as soon as possible. She wants to tell her she has no doubt it will happen, and soon enough, because there are enough people willing to fight for it. She wants to believe as unwaveringly as Annie does in this world. But she’s not sure if when the time comes, she will be able to succeed where she is needed.

It’s supposed to be more than a rebellion. It’s supposed to overturn the past seventy-five years and make a better world. Sometimes Frances isn’t even sure why she was asked to help be a part of it, other than the fact that she certainly has reason to want this all gone. What Victor - what person from the districts- wouldn’t? 

She can’t think of what will happen if it doesn’t come to be, because what would that mean for Annie? So instead of saying any of her fears or making any promises, Frances just sighs and says, “the world would be a much better place if there were more people who thought the way you do.”

“Don’t count yourself out, either,” Annie says to her.

Frances tries to smile at her. “If you say so,” she says. Annie puts her cool, waterlogged hand to the side of Frances’ face and the seawater drips into her mouth and she and kisses her.

_

“Listen, Mom,” Frances says quietly one evening over dinner at her mother’s house, the ocean waves audible through the open window, a warm evening breeze coming through into the house. “I just think you should know that just because you love me, that doesn’t mean you know everything about me, and if you did, you might be disappointed.” She looks straight at her mother, trying not to say much more. “I just want to say I’m sorry, because I don’t think I’m the daughter you deserve.”

Her mother looks at her for a moment and shakes her head. “I’m not perfect either, Frances. You know that, right?” She says it gently, but also like she genuinely doesn’t know the answer. “I know you want me to understand how much you love me and don’t hold anything against me, but that doesn’t mean I’m not…just a person, you know. You don’t have to live up to any expectations either.”

But I do, Frances says, it’s all I know how to do.

“Okay,” Frances says after a while, biting her lip and taking a spoonful of her mother’s crawfish stew.

“And you can tell me about yourself, Frances. You know it’s something you’re allowed to do now,” her mother says, looking concerned, and Frances doesn’t know how to tell her that she very much isn’t allowed to tell her some things. “One day,” her mother continues, “I’ll tell you more about…when you were younger. You’re definitely old enough to hear about it,” she says, clearly trying to keep herself composed.

Frances nods her head quietly, and looks down at her dinner. She isn’t sure what else she’s able to say right now.

“We’re okay, Frances,” her mother says after a moment. “We’re alive. Do you think anyone ever expected that of us?” she’s half-smiling, her eyes deep and knowing.

Frances shrugs, supposing her mother has a point. “I guess you have that right,” she says.

“Yeah,” her mother says, more serious now. “We’re alive, Frances. And regardless of what either of us has done, we can’t spend our lives feeling sorry about it. We have to do more than that.”

Frances looks at her mother for a long time and wonders how she would react if she knew the truth about her and Annie, or other secrets she hasn’t revealed, including the ones she isn’t technically supposed to keep between her and the Capitol. She would probably be very understanding, because that’s how she’s been so far. Given what other people have been like to her, Frances supposes she can see why she so easily decided her mother was flawless, and far-removed from her.

“All right, mom,” Frances says, not disagreeing but not knowing if she can ever do what she’s being asked, “you’re right about that, as well.” She has more of her stew. “And this is very good,” she says, smiling a little, hoping the conversation can go in another direction and keep going and not turn back, at least for tonight.

_

Frances supposes she isn’t surprised when she hears President Snow announce the rules for this year’s Quarter Quell. Oh, she realizes, he must have wished he could get rid of us and then realized he could do exactly that. Or, more likely, Plutarch gave him the idea and Snow didn’t realize it would likely just make the people of the Capitol begin to disapprove of the Games.

On the day of their first meeting, Plutarch had told her to expect something big. He could have given her a general idea, she thinks, but maybe even he wasn’t sure how he’d turn out. He must have all kinds of plans lined up in case one or the other didn’t work.

She doesn’t know everything, but she’s in deep enough to know a good amount.

“No,” she can hear Annie saying, her voice sounding like it’s coming from a place deep inside of her, “oh no…” Frances turns and sees Annie’s unblinking eyes staring to the wall, through it, back to the flooded canyon.

“Annie,” Frances says quietly, but Annie doesn’t seem to register that Frances says anything, she just keeps shaking her head and curling into herself.

“Annie,” Frances says, “please look at me.” Annie slowly turns her head, as if she’s in the dark and can barely figure out which direction is which. “I won’t let them make you go back in, okay? I won’t. If they call your name I’ll volunteer, you know I will.” Plutarch had better fucking have a good plan lined up, she thinks.

Annie nods her head slowly in understanding, closing her eyes as Frances grasps onto her hands like she’ll drown if she doesn’t hold on. “Please be careful, Frances,” Annie says under her breath, her eyes opening slowly. “You know what I mean. I don’t want to lose you.”

Sometimes Frances thinks she wouldn’t even bother, if not for Annie.

“All right, Annie,” Frances says quietly. “I’ll….I’ll try.” In the background the television is still on, Caesar Flickerman’s voice reporting on Snow’s announcement, so loud even with the volume lowered he may as well be in the room right now. She takes a deep breath and looks Annie in the eyes. “I didn’t think it would come to this.” She wonders if any of Plutarch’s secret plans involve her dying for the cause. Probably not. Martyrdom is not for people like her.

“I didn’t think it would either,” Annie says, shaking her head. “But I suppose I’m not very surprised.”

“No,” Frances realizes, “I guess I’m not either.”

“I think,” Annie says, looking down at her hands, “that nothing in this world surprises me anymore. I just…lost that part of myself if it was ever in me. Every time something happens I think, I should have seen it coming. It always ends up making sense to me.”

“I know,” Frances says, her voice coming out quieter than she intended. Annie isn’t wrong. “You surprised me, though,” she says. “When we met, you know. I had no one. I didn’t think anyone would ever care about me. But you did. I don’t know where I’d be without you, Annie.”

Annie looks at her, her eyes wide. “I don’t know what I would have done without you either, Frances,” she says, “especially not after….you know.” She sighs, putting her head in her hands. “I don’t ever want to know, either.”

If it comes to it, Frances knows she’ll volunteer for Annie, and she’ll do what she has to in order to get out of that arena a second time, if it comes to it, even if it makes the whole of the Capitol hate her. What they feel for her isn’t so far removed from hate anyway, she thinks. She doesn’t think she’ll be able to rest, really, until she’s sure Annie isn’t going to have to go back, until she’s back in the Capitol and Plutarch tells her exactly how he plans to have this begin the rebellion. It won’t be easy, she supposes. Even if he’d told her it would be, she wouldn’t have believed him. She knows too much of people in the Capitol to ever completely believe them.

Frances wraps her arms around Annie, and she feels Annie’s hand on hers, and at least for the time being, neither of them are going to have to know what it is to be alone without the other.

_

When they call Frances’ name at the Reaping, she reminds herself that she shouldn’t be surprised at all. This was probably on purpose. Putting her back in the arena would get very high ratings. (The male tribute this year is Aengus Shell, a middle-aged man she’s only ever spoken with a few times who spends most of his time on his boat.) It’s best this way, she thinks, even as she hears Annie gasp, but then she sees Mags step away from her and she realizes what Mags must be doing, Mags who knows as much as she does about the rebellion.

“No, Mags,” she tells her, “don’t do it,” but Mags isn’t stopping. She’s raising her arm and Calpurnia puts her hand over her mouth in shock, then over her heart, for the cameras, and Frances says, “Mags, no,” again, because she doesn’t know what else to do, and she hears Annie crying. It comes to her that the reporters in the Capitol are probably all over this footage right now. And she’ll be there soon enough anyway, probably in the same train as Mags.

Mags looks at her and kisses her on the cheek, puts one arm around her and the other in the air, and Frances, always aware that she is being watched, that everyone around her is being watched, smiles and puts her arm up in the air as well. Even as she thinks of taking both the glass vases and filling them with water until all of the slips of paper are so soaked the ink fades away.

“Why did you do it,” she asks Mags in the train, her voice shaking, her eyes stinging with salt water, “why, Mags…”

Mags doesn’t talk for a moment, just looks straight at Frances, with kindness, but also with a hardness in her eyes, the expression she’d seen in the pictures of Mags from so many decades ago when she’d won.

“I’m not afraid of going back,” Mags says quietly. If anyone’s listening, Frances is secure in the fact that most people can hardly understand Mags anyway. “I’m a part of this too. For a very long time…for a very long time, people have been waiting for something like this, for a real movement to begin.”

“But how-” Frances doesn’t even finish her sentence, she just stops talking. Maybe it isn’t fair of her to keep questioning Mags like this, when there are probably so many things Frances doesn’t know about her, when Mags has so many of her own reasons to join a movement that people have probably been trying to get started before Frances was even alive.

“I’ll help it along,” Mags says calmly. “It’s already well on its way. It’s coming, don’t you worry it won’t,” she says, putting her hand on Frances’ arm. “And I know you’ll know what to do.”

No I won’t, she wants to say, but isn’t going to drag down Mags with any of her thoughts like that. Mags is Mags, and understands more than most people do, and sees the good in people that others tend to ignore, and maybe, Frances thinks, that’s why Mags believes in her. Or maybe it’s because Frances will do what she has to do in life, regardless of personal costs, and keep on going regardless of the pain. And because despite everything, she’s learned to protect others, as much as she can.

Perhaps this is what Mags sees in her. A rebel from the districts should know how to take hits and how to get back up, again and again. Maybe Frances is even better at that than she is at giving the hits in the first place. Maybe she always was. The most necessary, and most difficult skill there is, sometimes, when you are a District Four girl and no one can protect you and you can’t protect anyone, and you have no options and have never belonged anywhere that can be walked on.

Maybe Mags was like that once, and that’s what she sees in Frances.

“I’d go in your place,” Frances said, “I really would, Mags. I want you to know that.” The worst part, Frances thinks, is that if she went back she might actually want to win, for Annie’s sake if not for her own, but then, would it be fair to Annie? To do it all over again and inflict herself on her?

“No, Frances,” Mags says. “It’s my place. I chose it. You tell them that when this is over,” the resolve in Mags’ voice is unmistakable. “And you have your own place. Maybe it hasn’t been entirely made yet, but it will be up to you. You and Annie, I know you’ll both have the freedom to choose your own lives, soon enough.”

Frances wants to thank Mags, she wants to say Mags is better than all the people in the Capitol she knows put together, she wants to say as long as she lives she won’t ever let this country forget Mags. But she doesn’t. “Mags, please don’t…just let yourself die,” she pleads under her breath. No, she doesn’t have the greatest odds, Frances doesn’t need Caesar’s show to tell her that, even if an old woman winning the Games may not be any stranger than an average boy from Six being turned into a cannibal overnight due to the Games, or two kids from Twelve winning together, or a fourteen year old girl from Four winning, or a girl from Four winning because she swam for three days and nights on end. It still feels wrong, letting Mags go, when she was the one called.

Mags shakes her head, smiling with her mouth closed. “I was sixteen when they reaped me,” she says. “My parents weren’t even from Panem. They had the misfortune to move here right before this all happened. When the Eleventh Games were announced, Snow was a game maker. An influential one, but young and new all the same. There was no such concept as being a Career, Victors didn’t become well known, many people, District or Capitol, didn’t even watch. Our mentors were Capitol people. We barely had any training. Half of us died in the first hour.” Us, Frances thinks, realizing not once during her own Games had she ever thought ‘us’. “No one expected me to win. In fact, I was advised to go for the thickest fighting, because dying like that might be better than the mutts or starvation or rabies. But they didn’t take into account I knew a thing or two about surviving.” Her eyes darken. “I knew more than many of us knew, and it took me a very long time to make peace with myself, not just for when I killed, but when I survived and others didn’t.”

Frances had never considered that this was something that had tormented Mags, not because she thought Mags didn’t have a conscience, but because she’d been so convinced she was a horrible person that she hadn’t thought someone like Mags would feel that way, because why would she have a reason to?

“I was alive before all of this. When I won, it was the year the game makers decided to market the Games more, make them more into a spectacle. It was the first habitat-arena, it was the first one with lots of television coverage, the first with stylists. I was the first Victor to tour Panem. If I couldn’t be the last Victor to do so, or the last Victor at all, or the last tribute in the last Games,” Mags says, “then I can do what I can to make sure there won’t be any more. Then, I would be just letting myself die. I would have been letting myself die for the last sixty-four years. No,” she says. “Don’t feel badly, Frances. I’m doing what I need to do. Not just what I have to do. And I know you can do the same.”

Frances tries to imagine what that might look like for herself, but mostly just thinks about all Mags said. She’s not sure if she can live up to what Mags is doing. But she supposes she has to – needs to try.

_

Mags walks into poisonous fog as an act of self-sacrifice, wearing the golden bracelet Effie Trinket had given Haymitch Abernathy who had given it to her and before the Games had told Frances he would do so “because we’re all a part of this now,” and all Frances can think about, watching this on a screen in the Training Center rather than being there and witnessing it in person, is that she should have been there in her place. In the moment, she’s not sure how this is helping anyone, even if the Games aren’t supposed to run their full course as planned. How much longer until it ends? How many more people are going to have to die on television? “I should have never let her volunteer for me,” Frances says, realizing how quiet and stunned her voice is. “It’s my fault.”

Annie is silently crying, her face frozen, as though her eyes are irritated and her tears are coming down her face as some kind of purely physical reaction. She’s shaking her head in what Frances at first thinks is disbelief or horror in what she’s seeing. “No it’s not,” Annie says, sounding very far away. “Once someone volunteers, you can’t stop them.”

“We don’t have to watch this anymore,” Frances says to her. “Not if you don’t want to.”

Annie turns to her, her face shining and clear. Her eyes are wide with what looks like conviction. “I have to,” she says. “The least I can do is … see it all happen, this time. When I was in there I … I didn’t even see so much of it. Because of when I was hiding. And because when I was in the water…I didn’t look around at all. I couldn’t concentrate on anything other than staying above water.” Frances doesn’t say anything, realizing Annie is right, and she’s probably selfish for wanting to turn away when Mags would have wanted her to keep her eyes open, when Annie is trying to come to terms with her present loss and her past. Frances doesn’t want to see any more people die, but she’s going to have to. Annie knows that, and Mags knows- knew that, and Frances supposes she has to accept that if she’s going to go along with any rebellion, if she’s going to be able to live even one day longer.

“All right, Annie,” Frances says, staying by her side. 

_

The second Katniss shoots her arrow into the forcefield of the arena, Frances remembers what Plutarch had said- that the Girl On Fire was going to burn the Games down, she just had to figure it out for herself. Literally, she supposes. That was the plan, she’d been given a (last-minute, in her opinion) briefing when the first few days had gone according to plan, and she isn’t surprised at all when there is a knock on her door at her room in the Training Center. She takes a deep breath and goes to answer it, hoping Annie will be protected, preparing to be silent and say she doesn’t know anything.

Maybe she’s been preparing her whole life, in a way.

On the other side of the door are multiple people in uniform. “I think you know why we’re here,” the leader, a tall man with dark hair says. She does not allow herself to react at all, just stands there, her face blank.

“You’ll want to cooperate. We have Annie Cresta,” a shorter, lighter haired man says. “Don’t worry, nothing happened to her. And nothing will as long as you do what we ask of you.” He almost sounds bored, like he’s waiting for his shift to be over, like he does this all day and it gets repetitive, she thinks.

“Where is she,” Frances finds herself saying. “What did you-” One of the people in the group puts her in handcuffs, and pulls her out of the doorway.

“We have some questions to ask you,” the leader says, “You know what this is about. Tell us what we need to know,” he says as he leads her down the hall, “and the crazy girl doesn’t get hurt. I doubt she even notices she’s not in Four anymore.”

Fuck you, Frances wants to say, but knows she can’t, and if they really think Annie has no idea at all of what’s going on in this country right now, let alone what goes on directly around her, she’d better stay even more quiet than she’d anticipated. It’s probably a good thing for Annie, she realizes, and hates that Annie has to live in a world where her best option for the moment is her captors and would-be torturers condescending to her and leaving her fate up to Frances rather than their own decisions. Well, she supposes, in a way it will still be their decision, whatever they do, and maybe they’re lying and she won’t be able to convince them to have mercy for Annie. But she can’t think like that, she can’t allow herself to give up on Annie.

Frances wonders if they’re aware that she knows even during the Games, there were uprisings in the districts, including her own. That people in Four did the mockingjay salute when Mags died and the mayor of Eight has joined the rebels in his district. She wonders if knowing, or not knowing, would be better for Annie.

Frances wonders if the people in the Capitol even remember she has a mother, and she hopes Maeve Odair is long forgotten by them.

“I’ll do what you say,” Frances whispers in her most convincing voice. She’s convinced so many people from the Capitol before. She’s taken all their secrets and kept her own. She has to keep doing that now, she tells herself.

They leave her to wait in a metallic cell, all four walls gray and shining and cold. She can’t hear anything through the walls, but assumes Annie is on the other side of one of them. She has to. They don’t bother to keep her chained. She keeps her hand against the floor, to sense movement, and waits for them to come.

_

“Good morning, Frances,” a completely new group of people appear, and she supposes it could be any time of the day and they could be lying. She doesn’t say anything, and she notices their syringes and needles, and understands what’s inside of them.

Every tribute, everyone who’s watched the Games knows that tracker jackers’ strings bring hallucinations. Frances has been told a secret about it, that their venom is used during interrogations in parts of the Capitol that most people don’t know exist. So Frances knows what’s coming, and in a way, it makes her feel almost calm about it. She knows what is going to happen, and there is nothing that can be done now. She doesn’t feel like when she went into the Games. She has no idea how to describe what she feels and soon she won’t even remember what it feels like, she supposes. Frances wonders what Marina and Glimmer saw before they died as the needle goes into her arm, and she thinks, one way or another, the needle still got me in the end-

And the cell is filled with swamp water and she can feel her feet in the lukewarm, muddy ground and the alligators surround her, protecting her. And Ermine is screaming and bleeding at her feet and she screams too and she’s covered in blood but she doesn’t know whose it is, if it’s hers or his or both. _I’m sorry_ , she screams to him, _I’m so sorry,_ and he says, _it’s okay, they can’t hurt us now, see?_ But she doesn’t see, and his eyes are the pale blue filmed-over color of the dead, so of course, she thinks, they see different things.

_What do you know?_ he asks her.

_What do you mean?_ she says. _All I know is where I set my traps, I didn’t know about the alligators. The sponsors keep giving me gifts when you’re all asleep. I don’t know why they don’t give more to you, I’m sorry_ , she tells him and one of the alligators wraps his jaw around her hand, and she remembers that the jaw strength of alligators is uniquely powerful but if you can manage to keep their mouths shut they can’t open them, they can’t attack if you close their mouths first. She should have told Ermine that but there were so many of them and he only had two hands and maybe since they were mutts it would have been different. She knew she should have told him anyway.

_What do you know about the rebellion?_ Ermine asks her and mud comes out of his mouth when he talks and she says _what rebellion, hasn’t it been sixty-five years?_

She is very tired.

And she is in someone’s bed, she can’t remember whose, with Cashmere, it must be one of the nights where they were both called at the same time. There are so many different nights that it can be hard to keep them all straight. Cashmere is lying flat on her back and there is an empty space in the middle of the bed separating her and Frances and he is probably going to come back soon, or maybe he hired more and she forgot, sometimes they give her drinks. Never morphling though. The high society in the Capitol doesn’t like morphling, they say it’s a poison for the districts to slowly kill themselves with and they have that right, at least, don’t they, they say this as a joke, but it’s not really meant as a joke. Yes, she’s probably just had too much alcohol and it’s never good for her when she does because she can’t handle it, Johanna is right, she’s too much of a District Four Gael to handle anything addictive and maybe that’s why it calls to her…

_This world is hell_ , Cashmere says, looking out of the corner of her eye, not moving.

_But you died. Is where you are better?_ Frances asks. Yes, that’s right. Cashmere died, she saw it on the television, she and Gloss both died almost at the same time and they weren’t the only ones-

_Focus on yourself, kitten,_ says Cashmere, the corner of her mouth going up in a wry smile.

_You know me, Cashmere. I can’t,_ Frances says, and laughs, and someone’s reaching into the bed and grabbing her hand and twisting it.

She dreams she’s being questioned in a gray cell. “What does the rebellion plan on doing next?” the interrogators ask her sternly as they have her chained to a wall.

“I don’t know anything,” she says, shaking her head, her words bitter but her voice toneless with exhaustion, “I’m just the way you like me. All I know is what you tell me.”

She doesn’t remember the rest of the dream.

Frances raises her hand and sees blood, so much, a wave of it, so pure and vivid, like red tides, like what Snow had promised her would happen to the Four coastline if she didn’t do what he asked. She sees Amber, whose black shirt is stained darker where the knife went into her ribcage. Amber is pallid and dripping with blood but other than that looks mostly the same. Rough, but doesn’t everyone look rough when they’re a tribute.

_I guess I was wrong,_ Amber says apologetically, _maybe sometimes you should hide for your own good. I could have thought about that. But I suppose it wouldn’t have made much of a difference for me._

_You could have got out. I didn’t deserve it any more than you did or Ermine or any of us,_ Frances says, feeling the warm blood slowly congeal on her hand, itching all over.

_But it was always going to be you_ , Amber tells her, _don’t you realize?_

_Yes,_ she says, and it feels good to be able to speak the truth to her. That’s the least she can give Amber, and herself.

_We know you always had a part in this,_ says the voice on the speakers, reverberating through the arena, _we know you were in on it from the beginning, tell us what you did_.

_I did everything you told me to and nothing else_ , she says, looking up, where the cameras must be watching her. The blood is running again. _Just don’t hurt Annie_ , she says, hoping they’re still watching her.

She can’t sleep so she hums herself the song Annie sang, she doesn’t know the words really, she’d remember them if Annie was here to sing them so she just hums the tune of it. He fell asleep to war songs, she thinks, that was how it ended. _What is that_ , the man in bed next to her asks.

_Oh, nothing, it’s just a song, I don’t even know the words_ , she reassures him, and feels her eyes close. She dreams she hears a girl screaming, and she wakes thinking of poor Marina, and she bites down on her hand so hard she draws blood, so she won’t make any sound crying, so the man won’t wake up.

Lupine Gears is there and so is Axle Leclerc and they are each holding one of her hands. _It won’t hurt,_ they promise her, _it feels so good, it always does._ A needle pierces the flesh of the underside of her arm. There are many marks there, she can feel them. It doesn’t feel good, she wants to say, but she falls asleep instead.

And she is fourteen again and Mags is the only other person awake. _Mags, I’m so happy to see you,_ she says and Mags holds her in her arms. _I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m tired._ She wonders if both of them are dead now. Mags had died in the arena, Frances remembers that. Because Mags had volunteered so that neither her nor Annie would need to go in.

Mags tells her, _I’m here for you. No matter how difficult things are, it’s better when you are not alone, remember?_

_I still don’t know what to do, though_ , Frances says. She closes her eyes, and she could be anywhere, and she doesn’t mind, after all, Mags is here, isn’t she. She never wants to leave Mags, not now, not ever again. Maybe Mags would still be alive if she had not let her volunteer, if Mags’ name had been called and Frances had volunteered in her place…but then maybe Mags would be here…but if she is not here then where is she?

_Get some rest,_ Mags tells her, and Frances falls asleep, very quickly. She has no dreams.

When she wakes up Mags is no longer there, and her arm pulsates from a needle being shoved into her vein, how many places, how many injections? She does not know. She can’t get her arm to move into her line of vision to see. Her hand feels sore and she smells blood.

_Oh Dymphna, Saint of Eire, Demon Slayer and Martyress, please intercede for me, pray for me, guide me._ She’s not sure if she’s saying this aloud or not and all the colors around her are melting into one another like she’s looking through a warped, colorful glass, like they have at some of the parties in the Capitol. Mags had once told her to pray when she was afraid. That was a good idea, she thinks. _Oh Magdala Apostle to the Apostles, I know I have done wrong, I repent. Patrick, Saint and Apostle of Eire, please intercede and protect me from the wrongdoings of others. Morrigna dark phantom queen please if there is a chance for Annie to live, help her fight._

_What the fuck is she talking about_ , the person with the needle says, she thinks there are a few people here. _I can’t even understand what she’s saying._ One of them grabs onto her face. Says _you’d better start naming names_.

_Tell me Annie is safe,_ she finds herself saying although she’s not sure if they heard her or not. If she wasn’t, Frances thinks, she would have heard her screaming. She’s heard other people screaming but not Annie and they told her Annie is in the room next to her. That’s what she thinks but she could have gotten it wrong - 

There is a silence and one of the people says, as if considering it for the first time, _I think she has gone mad from the injections._

Of course, of course, though. She is a mad girl, because that is what people are saying about her, and has her whole life not been becoming what people say she is? Perhaps she was always meant to be mad. Frances laughs, and laughs, until they inject her again, not even having to hold her arm back, because, she realizes, she is chained to the wall after all, that hadn’t been a dream.

She doesn’t think she’ll remember what happens next.


	4. IV

“ _It’s Annie and me and they’re all sitting around here like cardboard people judging; it’s Annie and me. And what we did that they think is wrong, when you pare it all down, was fall in love._ ”- _Annie on My Mind_ , Nancy Garden

Frances is in a hospital bed, it seems like, possibly there’s an entire wing of a hospital. She can feel something strange around her hand, like some kind of cast, and the room is white and sterile and smells of chemicals, like the time she’d visited her grandmother in the hospital when she was eleven. There doesn’t seem to be a busy hall outside the door crowded with people on stretchers because there isn’t enough room for them to all have beds, the way it was with her grandmother. ( _What are you reading grandmother?_ She’d asked once as a child when she saw her grandmother reading the newspaper and her grandmother had laughed and said _the Gaels’ sport pages_ and Frances must have looked confused until her grandmother said, _well that was what we called the obituaries, in my day_.)

With vague horror she wonders if the Capitol is trying to heal her so things can go back to regular, and the rebellion has failed. But this room looks nothing like the hospitals in the Capitol- she’s been in them. There are tubes in her. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t hurt, when surely after all the venom put in her system, she’d be in pain?

“Hello?” she calls out. No one seems to be around, and her voice is hoarse. Her head feels like she’s slept for too long, which is probably what happened, she vaguely remembers going in and out of sleep, some kind of soldier picking her up from the ground-

_Where the fuck is Annie tell me where she is,_ she remembers screaming, backing against the wall, covering her eyes from the light of the flashlights of the soldiers.

_Shit she’s more hysterical than the Cresta girl_ said one of them. She thinks she’d tried to say something but the words that came out of her mouth weren’t coherent enough to be understood.

_She’s all right, we’ve rescued her too,_ one of them said and she’d let them take her then and put her on a stretcher. There was nothing else to do. That was all she had wanted to know.

District Thirteen, she remembers. So this is it. “Hello?” she calls out, but her voice doesn’t seem to be able to be very loud right now. There’s some kind of red button next to her bed, which is probably what she’s supposed to press if she wants people to come, rather than just calling out. Maybe, she thinks, growing more tired, smiling to herself because whatever’s going into her feels like the sun is running through her veins, she’ll do it when she wakes up.

_

A pallid blonde woman and a young girl with her hair pulled back are in front of her bed when she wakes up. Frances thinks the woman is the girl’s mother, although the girl has a darker complexion than her mother, and a rounder face, and her pale gray jacket looks like it has orange cat hairs all over it. Frances finds herself smiling, because laughter is too much effort.

“Frances?” the young girl says.

“That….that’s me,” she finds herself saying, wanting to sit up to be able to talk to the two of them better but being too tired to. “What happened? I don’t remember it all….where’s Annie? Annie Cresta….” She realizes she’s begun crying and the young girl looks up at her mother as if she’s expecting to be told what to do. But the young girl looks back to her and smiles at her gently. “She’s all right, don’t worry,” the girl says. “She’s nearby in one of the other rooms. You’ll be well enough to go see her soon. My name is Prim,” she says.

“Prim,” Frances says, trying to wipe her face with her right hand, “thank you so much.” Prim, she realizes, it must be Primrose Everdeen. “It’s…good to meet you.”

Mrs. Everdeen steps forward, looking more focused than any of the doctors in the Capitol who’d ever tended to her after some patron went too far, or the doctors on the hovercraft after she won her Games. “You’ve been visited by some doctors while you were under. I’m a medic, not a doctor, but I’ve been here too,” she explains. Frances nods. “You and many of the other Victors were rescued from the Capitol a few days ago.”

Days, she thinks. Well, at least she hasn’t lost weeks. “What else,” Frances asks. She has to. She can’t not know, and she’d rather hear it from Mrs. Everdeen, who seems to care about her work, than from one of the District Thirteen doctors right now.

“You were severely tortured in the Capitol,” Mrs. Everdeen says, holding her wrist, she supposes to check her pulse. “The torturers injected you with tracker jacker venom to give you hallucinations and distort your reality. You were also given morphling in intervals, likely because they thought it would make you more compliant and more likely to reveal information. So you may not remember some things.”

“Some things I do remember,” Frances says vacantly. Prim is biting her lip, listening intently.

“Frances…” Mrs. Everdeen begins, “your hand is bandaged because you lost some fingers on your left hand. They were cut off in the Capitol and thankfully there’s no infection.”

Frances feels herself nodding. “That explains it,” she says, to herself as much as she’s saying it to Mrs. Everdeen. “But they didn’t do any of that to Annie, right,” she just needs to be sure.

“No,” Prim tells her. “We can tell her you were asking about her though, because she’s been asking about you.”

“Thank you so much,” Frances says, her breath a pained shudder.

“Right now,” Mrs. Everdeen tells her, “the doctors are having you administered with doses of morphling. That’s why you may be feeling certain things, and they’ll make sure to taper you off-”

Frances realizes she’s no longer paying attention to Mrs. Everdeen, she’s looking out of the corner of her eye at the machinery and tubes she’s attached to, and down at her hand, bandaged in so many layers it almost doesn’t look like a hand. It occurs to her that under normal circumstances she might try to rip the tubes out of her, but she doesn’t feel up to doing it at all, and part of her doesn’t want to.

“Hey,” she hears a quiet voice close to her, and she realizes she’s turned somewhat and had been facedown on the pillow. Frances tries to get on her side, and sees Prim next to her. “It’s all right. You’re safe now,” she says, and Frances understands why her sister would volunteer to take her place.

No, I’m not, she thinks, feeling like she’s floating on a soft, warm wave, wondering how long it will take until it feels like she’s dying. She doesn’t want Annie to see her like this, but she thinks she’ll inevitably lose her mind to the morphling if she doesn’t see her.

“You’ve been through a lot,” Mrs. Everdeen tells her, with the sureness of experience. “But it’s nothing you won’t recover from.”

Frances wants to be able to believe her.

The morphling dulls her senses, and fills her dreams with ocean sunsets of a thousand colors.

_

It’s been what she thinks may be a few days. She isn’t sure, and that’s when she knows she has to do it. When Frances wakes up, she presses the red button. A doctor comes into her room, not Prim or her mother. “Are you recovering well, Citizen Odair,” the doctor says reservedly.

“I have something to ask,” Frances says quietly, not sure what her standing is here, because for all she knows she’s in the hospital ward of a District Thirteen prison, “if I may.” The doctor looks at her expectantly.

“Take me off the morphling, as soon as you can. Now, if it’s possible,” she says, realizing as it comes out of her mouth that she didn’t state it as a question, and she doesn’t want to sound like she’s begging, but it might be better for her in the long run if it does sound like that.

The sooner she can get off of this, the sooner she’ll be well enough to be able to see Annie, who is all alone right now, surrounded by people who just see her as “mad” and don’t understand. She has to do it for Annie, no matter how much it will hurt.

“The withdrawal symptoms will be more intense if you get off it now,” the doctor warns.

“I know,” Frances says, looking down at her left hand. The bandages have come off by now. It’s strange to look at it.

“All right then,” the doctor says to her, his eyes unreadable, his tone sounding as if he’s not sure what to make of her. Good, she thinks, so they all haven’t made up their mind about me, not just yet. “You can’t spend the rest of your life here anyway. It’s not as if you’re mad or anything,” he says contemptuously, towards Annie, she assumes, and in that moment she realizes this place was never going to save either of them.

Maybe the morphling was always calling her, just as it always called to her mother, but if it didn’t kill her mother, if her mother could heal from it, maybe she can too, maybe she has no choice in it. Now that it’s happened, she doesn’t have to wonder as much anymore, about what it would be like.

The doctor disconnects her, and she waits for the withdrawal to start.

_

“They said I could visit you,” Annie says, she’s wearing a gray outfit, dressed like Mrs. Everdeen and Prim, and Frances doesn’t know if she’s even real at first. With how much venom and morphling have gone into her veins, she’s not sure if she can be confident in trusting what she sees anymore.

“Annie?” Frances asks, her limbs and stomach aching, her whole body shivering and sweating. “Are you really here?” Her stomach lurches and she feels sick.

“Don’t be afraid,” Annie says to her, climbing up onto the bed. “It’s me. I’m real.”

Frances starts crying. “Annie,” she says, lying on her back barely able to move, and Annie lies down next to her and wraps her arms around her, and Frances leans forward against Annie and their foreheads are touching and Annie isn’t letting her go, she keeps saying that she’s _not leaving, don’t worry, Frances_. Frances has spent so much of her life feeling wrong, but this is the first time in a while she’s felt anything close to right, so close to Annie they’re like one person, even when she’s in this state and they’re so far from home.

She’d thought she would shrink away from Annie, because she’d felt that she didn’t deserve Annie, never had, that she was so unclean and sick that she sometimes didn’t know how she was able to bring herself to inflict herself upon Annie. But she did anyway, she knows, because she loves Annie that much and because she knows Annie loves her. Not despite who she is, but for who she is.

“You’re alive,” Frances manages to say, “you were- they took you, too-”

Annie nods quietly. “They said I was there as a hostage. My treatment depended on your behavior. They just…locked me in there. Like they forgot all about me.” She gives a small, sad smile, her mouth shaking. “I could hear screaming sometimes…I’m so sorry, Frances.”

“You don’t have to apologize. I’m the one who- without me they wouldn’t have taken you,” she says, and Annie pulls up the thin hospital bedsheets over Frances’ shaking arms for some semblance of warmth. If they didn’t do things to Annie, did they think Frances was cooperating with them? Did she cooperate with them? She doesn’t remember. She doesn’t think she did. She hopes she didn’t. If she did, she couldn’t live with herself. But that would be a good reason to try and forget, not wouldn’t it.

She gags, her limbs folding in as she curls up in pain. Annie takes the basin from the side table and holds it under Frances’ mouth. Frances can’t even hold back her own hair as she feels herself throw up for what certainly will be the first of many times. Annie’s eyes are shining and Frances has never seen anyone more beautiful in her life. She looks up at her and, on her, the plain color of the District Thirteen looks like the silver-grey of freshwater pearls. It hurts so much, she wants to say, and despite how many times she’s come close to death, close enough to touch, this is the first time that truly feels like dying. In a way, since she’s entirely present for this, it feels more torturous than the actual tortures she’s endured and remembers through a haze of distortion.

Frances starts crying now, real crying that can’t be stopped in a moment’s time. For herself and for all her fellow captive tributes, for Mags, for everyone in the Quell. For her mother and Lupine Gears and Axle Leclerc and everyone who’s ever been where she is now, for the people in Four suffering because the Capitol is punishing them for her actions, for Annie, who found there was more to the world and had to see it wasn’t anything special or even particularly good after all.

“I know,” Annie says, her voice breaking. “It was all real.” Both the most necessary thing to learn and the worst thing to know, she remembers. She is doubled over, her head in Annie’s lap, and Annie is holding her, and the one thing she’s certain of now is that Annie won’t let go. “This is real too,” Annie says, her clear, soft voice sounding like the waves of Four.

_

Frances hasn’t been able to sleep, and has been trying to for she doesn’t know how long, and she can hear Annie’s conversation with the doctor. But she pretends to be asleep anyway, because she can’t bring herself to talk to the doctor, not now.

“She doesn’t have anyone from home here,” Annie explains softly. “It’s best for her health if I stay with her. Not just here, but for a roommate. I don’t think she should be alone after everything she’s been through.”

Frances’ head is under the covers and she can’t see the doctor. “I suppose,” the doctor says, trying to sound like he hasn’t really been listening, because who would listen to a mad girl. The nurse is walking around the room checking something. “With only one of her hands working I suppose she would need someone helping her,” he says with blatant distaste. She wonders if he blames her for it, if everyone from here does. If she’d been better at it, if she was worth more to the rebellion, she would have said the right things that wouldn’t have made them cut her fingers off. Frances closes her eyes, her arms aching like they’ve been stretched out on a rack. She takes a labored breath, trying to be as quiet as possible, trying not to cry so the doctor doesn’t figure out she’s awake. This would be much more bearable if they let Mrs. Everdeen come back.

“Yes,” Annie says pleasantly. Now Frances is wondering if Annie is the one who isn’t entirely paying attention, which makes her almost smile under the covers, although she’s sure it comes out as some kind of twisted grimace given the pain she’s in. She feels Annie stroke the top of her head. “Given that we’ve both had similar experiences I’m sure we would be able to help one another adjust to life in Thirteen. We’re very grateful to be here. I always knew there was more than what the Capitol wanted us to believe,” Annie says. Annie has experience in saying what she has to say, Frances is well aware. But in a way it almost sounds like Annie is having fun with this District Thirteen doctor, saying what she has to say so well that he doesn’t notice she’s not saying any more than she must. Flattering him, as if he has anything to do with the existence of District Thirteen after the rebellion seventy-five years ago. Downplaying how much Annie truly knows Frances…sometimes Frances thinks Annie is just as good as secrets as she is.

This is real, she thinks, forcing herself to listen to the doctor’s horrible condescension towards Annie, to the things he says about Frances being _possibly unable to function for the rebellion_ and _we all hope she won’t be a morphling for good, we told her to take our advice_ and _we hope the tortures of the Capitol didn’t make her mad, and that her past…activities in the Capitol don’t allude to any sentimental loyalties._ All said in a very clear tone- _you’d better not have fucked this up any more than we already know, Frances, go shoot up, you stupid useless whore._

Annie would never say anything like that about her, she reminds herself. Her legs hurt almost too much to move. Her pillow is damp with sweat, and her hair has fallen over her eyes, but she doesn’t move it. She’s too tired to. She can feel Annie reach under the cover to hold her hand, and Frances tries her best to hold onto Annie and not only be held. When she falls asleep, she doesn’t even realize it.

_

“We can’t give her any more water than this,” the doctor is saying sternly, “even if she does have a fever. Besides, if she hasn’t recovered by now…” he says it and it sounds like disapproval. 

Someone is lifting a cup of water to her mouth and most of it she can’t swallow, but it’s cool on her tongue and makes her throat less sore. It must be Annie doing it. She opens her eyes, just a little, and sees it’s Annie. “You’re going to be better soon,” Annie whispers to her.

_Please give me morphling and then I’ll feel better_ , a faraway voice thinks, _then it won’t hurt so much, then the fever will go away, then maybe I’ll be able to breathe better._ Part of her is thankful she’s not well enough to carry on much of a conversation, because then there’s a chance she’d actually say this despite wanting so much not to, and someone working here would listen.

She swallows what water she can, and drifts back to sleep next to Annie, wondering if she’ll ever wake up.

_

When Frances wakes up, she feels as though she’s swam too fast and hit some rocks, but the fever is gone. She’s not sure what time it is but the lights in the room are dimmed and Annie is asleep on a chair next to her bed. Frances decides to let her sleep for now, flinching with guilt as she sees the dark circles under Annie’s eyes, knowing she at least is one of the reasons why. 

She looks down at both her arms, which were sticking out over the covers. It occurs to her that, regardless of what it’s like here, she’s glad this is nothing like the Capitol. If it was, the marks from the needle on her arm would have been disappeared away like they were never there. She doesn’t think she wants that, even if they’ll fade in time. It’s not that she particularly wishes to be scarred, but that she doesn’t want people clearing away everything that’s happened to her, speaking on her behalf so they can forget, when she’d never be able to.

It’s also good that the uniforms in District Thirteen have long sleeves. She doesn’t need anyone to see the marks on the inside of her arm. She just needs to know that no one got rid of them for her.

Her hand will take a lot of getting used to, she supposes. But mostly, she’s just grateful nothing like that was done to Annie, who has stayed by her side even now. Annie really does love her, she thinks, once again. She reminds herself of this all the time, and it always feels like discovering something unexpected, something she never would have let herself hope for. Frances hopes they’ll be allowed to be roommates. Even if no one here can know the truth about them, at least they can live side by side, for the first time since they were children, which seems much longer ago than it really was.

_

If it wasn’t for everything needing to be scheduled, Frances would probably be content, as content as she could be under the circumstances, given recent events. Annie is safe, the both of them are as far out of the Capitol’s reach as possible, and for the first time, they’re living together, and maybe here, they’re happier keeping their secrets than being open about them. And maybe that says something about how content and safe the two of them can really be here, be anywhere like this.

Mostly, it’s easy to get accustomed to. She doesn’t like the scheduling of everything, but it at least keeps her from lying in bed all day, keeps her from crying all the time, keeps her mind busy so she isn’t always thinking about everyone who’s died so she could be here. She still thinks about home, not even Thirteen can distract her from that. Or maybe being in Thirteen just intensifies how much she misses it.

She does have trouble using her left hand, and relies a lot on the right hand, even though she’s trying to get used to working with the left hand as well. There are some things that she just doesn’t know how to do, so Annie helps her, and she’s grateful for Annie helping her tie her boot laces or pull back her hair, but it just makes her sad more than anything else. Her hand doesn’t hurt anymore. But it’s as if the Capitol needed to tell her they owned every inch of her body and could take away any of it if they wanted.

Frances will unmake her bed and lay in it for a while before getting next to Annie in her bed, so that in the morning they’ll both make up their own beds, just to throw off anyone who may be watching, and Frances supposes they are. She supposes here, everyone is, especially the new population of Victors.

“If Coin doesn’t like us,” Annie says under her breath one night, facing Frances underneath their covers, “she’s just going to have to deal with us. She needs us.” For now, Frances thinks nervously.

“I don’t think it’s fair,” Frances says after that. “To ask as much of Katniss as she does. It’s just…when I was her age, I didn’t think I was a kid. But she is. And I just….I don’t know about all this sometimes. I look around and it just feels wrong. And sometimes I wonder if I’ve just lost my mind and I don’t know how to recognize anything right. But-”

“No,” Annie reassures her. “No, no, Frances,” she says, shaking her head. “Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t judge for yourself.” She shakes her head, discontented. “I thought here we’d be free of that but I suppose not.” Frances wonders angrily how many people here have called Annie mad or hysterical to her face. “But I know what you mean,” Annie says, reaching her hand out from the covers and placing it against the wall, as if to feel whether or not there are any movements, anyone coming. “It’s…not what I wanted when I spent so much time making myself believe there was still a world out there. And I don’t know what I expected, really. Maybe my expectations were too high. But if everything keeps going this way I really do worry. And it’s not the sort of concern that I think would go away if we just went back home when this is over. It’s like…” Annie inhales, pauses for a moment. “It’s like Coin is above ground with all her advisors and people like that. And we’re underground.”

“And when this is over, maybe we won’t be above ground, if it goes the way it’s meant to,” Frances adds. She never gave the Capitol one bit of information even when they cut off her fingers, and maybe that was just because she was hallucinating out of her mind, but shouldn’t that count for something here? Shouldn’t they know she’s not going to betray anyone to the Capitol, that she wants so dearly to see Snow’s regime end and something better to take its place? “Sometimes being here makes me feel like I’m being buried.” It almost sounds childish when she says it, she thinks, like she’s saying she’s afraid of the dark. And of course, Thirteen really didn’t have any other option. But Frances can’t help think that being here feels like waiting, one way or the other, for everything to collapse in on itself and crush her underneath so she can never come up again.

_(More weight,_ she thinks. When Beetee had shown her and Annie some of the historical documents he’d managed to find through hacking- Annie had taken an interest in learning about what he’d been finding and Frances had come along - some of them had been about Thirteen, long before it was Thirteen, back when it was a place called Colonial New England. At one point in a town called Salem in Thirteen, they hunted people they thought were witches. One of the victims was tortured by being tied down and having rocks placed on him, crushing him, but he didn’t admit to any evil magic, he just said _more weight_ and those were his last words. And Frances had wondered if the world had always been horrible, if it had always been full of sin and killing, and she’d been so caught up in her own thoughts Annie had touched her arm and asked if she was all right, and Frances had said she was, she had just gotten distracted. “It all ended,” Beetee had told them. “After a while there were apologies and memorials. So it would never happen again, and would be remembered as wrong, as something to learn from,” he’d smiled knowingly. Maybe because he was confident the same thing could happen now. Maybe because he was thinking what Frances was- that maybe nothing ever got better, it just stayed bad and looked different. She didn’t know. She hadn’t asked.)

“We’ve made it this far,” Annie tells her quietly, “just remember that, Frances, all right? It … feels very bad sometimes, I know. But you’re not buried. And I’m not drowning, not now. We might not be in a good place but we’re not dying,” she’d said softly, encouragingly. “And we have each other. We’re not alone.”

Frances wraps her arms around Annie, and she is warm underneath the cold, thin sheets.

_

Over dinner, at their table, Frances finds herself asking Johanna, “do you ever resent me?”

Johanna turns her head to look at her directly, and her gray-rimmed eyes stare with merciless directness. With her hair all fallen out, her wide, bright eyes look even larger. “What are you talking about,” she says, roughly but not without affection. Frances wonders if Johanna really doesn’t know what she means, or if she wants her to spell it out for whatever reason.

Frances looks down at her plate, unsure of how to answer. Thinking about Johanna, all alone in her hospital room, screaming at the doctors to give her more morphling and asking Katniss for hers later, and then going through the withdrawal completely alone, makes her stomach hurt.

She doesn’t feel it’s necessary to try and justify herself to Johanna, even though the words sometimes go through her head anyway- you know I hate them as much as you do, it’s not like I want to help them, it’s not like I ever wanted to, I had no choice even though I suppose I could have said no, I suppose I could have but I didn’t, I couldn’t bring myself to. Johanna knows. Frances isn’t even sure who those words are for- herself, maybe. “Everything in the Capitol,” she says finally. “I wasn’t ever strong enough to say no.” Johanna hardly ever brings it up, but sometimes Frances wonders if that isn’t just because Johanna doesn’t want people feeling sorry for her, but also because it hurts to talk about.

“Don’t look at it that way,” Johanna says, almost sounding angry. “Just don’t. That’s what they’d want you to think. They’d want you to think you were wrong just like they want me to think I was wrong and I killed my family.” She breathes in deep, her eyes clear and blazing like a bonfire. In another world, Johanna would be a leader, Frances knows. She would have already made her mark on the world for the better, and it wouldn’t have hurt her inside until all she could afford to express was anger.

“I know you didn’t,” Frances says quietly. “I never thought it was your fault. I just want to tell you that.”

“I know,” Johanna says, half smiling in a little twisting movement of her mouth. Then she looks at Frances. “Don’t worry about me,” she says, “all right?” Frances wonders if Johanna suspected she wanted to ask about the morphling, despite that to her knowledge, Johanna isn’t shooting it anymore. Or taking dosages, the doctors would say, or at least as long as they have a use for Johanna, then she’d be another addict to shut away until the withdrawal ends, like they did with Haymitch.

Frances smiles back at Johanna. “I can’t promise that,” she says. 

_

Katniss’ team have reportedly stormed the Capitol, according to the televised report she’s watching, and Frances thinks that if she hadn’t gotten her fingers cut off, she’d be there too. Maybe, she worries, she wouldn’t know how to control herself and she’d lose herself in the flash of weapons and she’d carve a red line through the Captiol, half of her trapped in the arena and the other half trapped in everyone’s bedroom in the city. And maybe they’d have to shoot her, and maybe Coin would actually like it if she did that, and maybe she’d do none of that at all, and maybe she’d just break and freeze and die, and maybe this is all irrelevant for her to think about because all she’s doing is standing around Thirteen doing nothing. It’s not that she judges Annie or Johanna this way. Annie’s actually learning a lot about technology from Beetee, and Johanna- she’d go, if she could. She can’t. And Frances knows it kills her that she isn’t able to. Frances realizes she doesn’t particularly want to go back, not that much. She would if she could, but she can’t and- maybe she’s all right with not being able to be there. She has no idea what she’s capable of anymore, or if she’s capable of anything.

No, Frances realizes. There is something she can do, there is a way she can help, there is a way she can help deal one of the final death blows to Snow’s collapsing regime.

When she realizes it she gets off her bed, rushes to put her shoes on as soon as she realizes she’s about to go out barefoot, and runs to where Beetee’s office is, hammering on the door even though he’s probably working on something important. This is important, too, she realizes, he’ll want to hear this- even Coin will look at her and see her contribution as worth something.

She’s still catching her breath when Beetee opens the door, his metallic blue wheelchair surprisingly vibrant as a stormy sea in this uniformly gray underground. “Beetee,” she says, “I have an idea for you. For a propo.”

“Yes,” Beetee says to her, as if he’d expected this. “Of course, Frances. I can certainly help you broadcast it to anywhere in Panem.”

“The Capitol,” she says, “them too.” She swallows hard and looks at him. “Beetee,” she tells him, feeling her heart beat so fast she wonders if it’s in danger of stopping. “I think I have something that will turn people in the Capitol against Snow.”

He smiles slowly, nodding at her. He takes her hand and leads her to his computer and shows her how he can broadcast videos to different places, and assures her it will be seen all over the Capitol once it’s filmed and put on the computer. She’s thankful he isn’t asking her whether or not she’s sure- because she is, and she knows it’s not going to feel good. But it’s still necessary. For the rebellion, and maybe also for her, personally. To be able to say to the whole world what happened to her and that it wasn’t her own doing.

Once it’s all filmed, she immediately leaves the set and finds Annie. “How do you feel?” Annie asks her.

“I don’t know,” Frances says, laughing nervously, her eyes filling with saltwater.

_

Alma Coin calls Frances (“Citizen Odair”) for a private meeting and the second she steps into the metallic room, she feels this will not go well. Coin never seemed to particularly trust her, but then, Frances doesn’t know if Coin trusts anyone. Be grateful she’s not Snow, a voice keeps telling her, and she’s always tried so hard to be grateful, she really has.

At least Snow didn’t care that you and Annie were together as long as you did whatever else he wanted, she thinks, and it’s a dangerous thought, but then, all of her thoughts are dangerous because she wasn’t ever really expected to think much about anything. Coin doesn’t know about her and Annie. She can’t. She hopes and prays to every god and saint she knows that this wasn’t what Coin called her in to talk about, and maybe, she tells herself, it isn’t, if Annie isn’t here too.

“Madam President,” she says uneasily, “good afternoon.” Coin smiles at her, her eyes inscrutable and bright.

“Take a seat, Citizen Odair,” Coin says. “I just have a few questions to ask.”

“Of course, Madam,” Frances says, her hands folded on her lap. She’s asked for her shirts and sweaters and coats to be a size too big, so her left hand is covered. Coin obviously knows about it, Frances just prefers to conceal it around her. She doesn’t like thinking about how useless she is to Coin. She doesn’t like thinking about what uses Coin might find for her, or what Coin might do to her when she stops being useful.

What she might do to Annie, when this happens.

Frances expresses her wariness regarding Coin to Annie, and to Katniss as well, who shares her distrust. But her fear- that, she has so far kept hidden. She hates this place. She’s still living every moment in fear.

“I called you in because of your recent propo video,” Coin says, even a simple statement sounding so commanding. Frances wants to close her eyes and beg Coin not to say any more. The thought of talking about it with her fills her with dread. She can hear Coin’s voice saying all Frances’ old thoughts in the back of her mind- _but you wanted it didn’t you? Why would any of them think you didn’t want it? Stop getting so upset, you stupid whore._

Instead, she thinks of being by the sea with Annie, and makes herself stay calm. “Is it all true?” Coin asks. “Of course, I wouldn’t blame you for … creating a story, if it does what we need it to do, which it has most definitely done, and I congratulate you for your efforts. The Capitol citizens are certainly turning against Snow in light of this news.” Coin smiles proudly, like it was her own achievement. Like she’d ever even asked Frances if she had anything to say in the first place. “Of course, no depravity is beyond the Capitol,” Coin says so judgmentally that her eyes glint with disgust. Frances wonders if Coin sees her as Capitol, or just one of their depravities. If there would be any effective difference.

“It’s all true. Every detail I mentioned,” Frances says, and being able to say it, even here, is almost liberating. Her voice does not waver as she looks Coin in the eye, unflinching, even if she wants to look at the floor, even if she wants to run out the door. If this is what gets her sent to the dungeons chained to the wall like Katniss’ unfortunate prep team, she won’t give Coin a single inch as long as she can see her. Give them what they demand but no more, and do it so well that they don’t even notice you’re just going through the motions. It’s something she’s very used to. “And while I said I wasn’t the only Victor, I am the only Victor here who was…involved in that.” She’s not even sure if this is true. Haymitch and Beetee both won long before her time, and maybe Snow made them do it too, and if there’s a chance he did, Frances isn’t going to let Coin know. Wherever Enobaria is, Frances hopes she’s safe from both Snow, and Coin, somehow, if there’s anywhere in the world that is safe from both of them.

“Hm,” Coin says, raising her eyebrows, an expression almost like amusement on her face. Frances wonders if she’s supposed to share whatever this is. For a brief, horrifying moment, Frances worries that Coin is like the voyeurs in the Capitol who would make her say in detail what she did with other patrons. She feels like Coin has just told her she is unclean. “And…may I ask,” of course you can, Frances thinks dryly, “were there ever…children from any of these unions?”

“No,” Frances says, quietly, not wanting to look at her but knowing she can’t look away, “no, Madam President. There were definitely none.”

Coin looks like she’s thinking this over. “The Capitol is very wasteful,” she says, shaking her head and looking to Frances as if she expects her to agree.

I hate you, Frances realizes.

“Rest assured, Citizen Odair,” Coin says with pride, “there are no prostitutes in District Thirteen.” It sounds like a warning. 

“Right, Madam,” says Frances, smiling and feeling the kind of cold that comes along with fevers, “of course.”

When she opens the door to the room she shares with Annie, Annie immediately looks concerned. “What happened there?” she asks softly.

Frances takes a deep breath. The stinging saltwater wants to run down her warmed, flush face and she wants to be sick. “The President wanted to talk with me about the video I did.” Annie’s hands clasp together and she walks forward.

“What you said was real,” Annie tells her. “What she said-” Annie shakes her head, as if to indicate the gravity of whatever Coin had to say. Frances wants to let herself collapse in Annie’s arms and cry and say, but you didn’t hear her, she said I’m depraved and a waste and pure Capitol and she is only keeping me around as long as I can help bring down Snow, she hates me and if she hates me what if she ends up hating you too, and once she replaces Snow then what is she going to do to us when she no longer has uses for a mad girl and a Capitol whore?

Sometimes in Snow’s office she had managed to comfort herself with the fact that he wasn’t lying, but of course, his truth was biased in a way she was very used to, having lived her whole life under his rule. They had an agreement of honesty, and they were, as much as they could be, themselves together. In Coin’s office, she had to hide everything to protect herself, she knew she couldn’t afford honesty. And she’d felt like she was being told not only was Snow right about her, but everyone else in her life who’d ever seen her as nothing. The worst part was that she almost felt Coin was right. That if she was in Coin’s place – in anyone’s place, really - what reason would she have to trust Snow’s number one moneymaker? 

(Katniss had told Frances that Coin had called her, Annie, Peeta, Johanna, and Enobaria “war criminals” for being captured by the Capitol, but that Coin had also said there couldn’t be that much harm in taking in Annie because, after all, she was nothing but a mad girl. Frances has a sinking feeling Coin doesn’t like Katniss too much, either.)

Frances nods her head, accepting what Annie has said, even though the saltwater is running down her face and she is crying quietly, so quietly that no one outside would hear. “You’re real. The person you are, not the person they say you are, Annie. You’re so much more than what they say about you and I never want you to forget that,” she manages to say.

Annie embraces her, putting her head on Frances’ shoulder. Sometimes even in private here, they’re too afraid to get too close.

This place is like an inversion of reality. When she’s allowed outside to go on walks with Katniss, who hunts, she can see what this place must have been hundreds of years ago, before the rubble and Dark Days and wars, when it was a region called New England, but now everyone lives in a horrible set of layers underground, like an endless descent, like a live burial. She hates it. Every time she goes outside here, it’s like coming up to the surface of water and breathing in deep.

“When this is over,” Annie whispers to her, “we can go back to Four. And we never have to be here again. It won’t be like the Quarter Quell where they can make us go back because when things are better,” she says, her voice fierce with belief, “no one is ever going to make us do anything again.”

Annie takes Frances’ tortured hand and holds it, softly, her calloused thumb running over her palm. One of the few things that feel good here. Frances closes her eyes and lets Annie guide her to the bed, where they lie down and rest until their next scheduled activity comes up.

Frances doesn’t regret what she’s told the country, or anything she’s told Annie.

_

Katniss front and center, three on one side and four on the other. It’s uneven. It’s all that’s left of the Victors. Frances wonders if Snow takes note of that and is satisfied by the depleted ranks before him, even though he’s about to be executed. He may well be. If he’s going to die in the rebellion, most of the Victors went down along with him, between the Quell, the government-ordered Purge, and some of the rebels’ killings of Victors they thought were loyal to the Capitol. Frances has never said it out loud, but she can’t understand that. She can’t understand why they would have thought any of them would have truly wanted the Capitol to keep going as they were. Sometimes she wonders if that was one of the reasons why she did her broadcast. To prove that the Victors were more than just Snow’s creations.

She still doesn’t know which side killed Delmar. She doesn’t want to know. But one day, soon, she knows she has to find it out.

She is next to Annie, who is next to Beetee, who is next to Enobaria. On the other side of the courtyard, not too far away, stand Peeta and Haymitch and Johanna. Frances hopes Johanna can find some peace in what’s about to happen, because if this doesn’t do it, she’s not sure what will. She hopes that the Capitol Games don’t actually happen, even though she’s not so sure that they will, and that Coin really is just an interim leader. She hopes that she and Annie can go back home, and everyone else here can go back home and no one will bother them ever again, but she’s not so sure if she believes that, not even now.

Frances is so distracted by her own thoughts that she hardly registers what Katniss has just done until Annie grabs her shoulder and gasps, taking her back into the world. The arrow is in Coin’s chest and she’s falling and she can hear Enobaria say _well I never trusted that woman anyway_ and Snow is laughing and there are footsteps behind her and Enobaria is yelling at her and Annie _hello, get moving before we get trampled_ and the crowd of Capitol people – they really are against him now, Frances thinks, and sure, it’s because they think he used these people’s families and neighbors as a human shield, but she thinks she’s finally done something, something of her own, something right, not because it’s ending in Snow’s death but because it made all these people realize what was around them- and she and Annie are moving to the side of the courtyard along with Enobaria and Beetee, whose chair, she notes, moves as fast as someone running. On the other side she can see Peeta looking confused (she really hopes he’s going to be able to be better), Haymitch looking unsurprised like he knew this would happen and she wonders if he did know, and Johanna looking up to Coin and then back to Snow, and a smile like a cat’s crosses over her face as the mob gets closer to Snow.

Frances doesn’t see where Katniss has gone. She hopes she can get out of here, once and for all. She deserves that much.

_

“Frances, wake up,” she can hear Annie’s lowered but excited voice, “look at the television.” It’s not early in the morning or anything, Frances has just been sleeping a lot lately. All she wants to do is go back home now. This Capitol doctor is protecting Katniss by saying she had some kind of mental break, but it’s doubtful that anyone will try and come for her anyway. Coin didn’t have many supporters that were so staunch after her death. At least, Frances has been thinking, there won’t be any more death. No one wants any more, she doesn’t think.

She feels tired all the time. It’s not like she intends to just stay in bed, not really, even though she has to admit to herself sometimes it’s all she wants to do. At first, once they got to the Capitol, she barely left her room unless she had to, but by now she’s gone out more- partly out of necessity, for the execution and the vote and things like that. Maybe one day she’ll be ready to walk the streets of the Capitol again, knowing it’s safe to now. But she isn’t ready yet, even with Annie at her side.

Frances opens her eyes, looking up at Annie, smiling at her. Annie’s eyebrows are raised, as if she’s just been staring forward, and she tosses her head sideways in a gesture to look beyond her, her hair waving as she moves.

On the television, Commander Paylor is being sworn in as President. Not Interim, but for real, for now, and after a vote.

“It’s okay to get as much rest as you need, Frances,” Annie almost sounds like Mags in the moment, “and I know how you feel. Believe me,” she says, biting her lip. “I know. I don’t want to see you fade away. Not after all of this. I get not feeling like celebrating, not now at least. But…” Annie looks as if she’s struggling to find the right words, and Frances realizes Annie must be trying to avoid talking to her the way the whole world has talked to Annie. Stop being sick, you hysterical crazy girl.

“I know, Annie,” Frances says, not sure how she’ll ever be able to express her gratitude to Annie even though Annie knows. “Someone I knew a long time ago once told me I couldn’t hide forever and- I guess she was right. And I killed her. But she was still right.”

Frances can feel the saltwater in her eyes. She never was able to tell any of them that she didn’t think she deserved to live more than they did. None of them ever got to see a world where not having to fight to the death and then barely be alive if they lived was even an option being considered by a new and secret rebellion. They died while she hid away, not knowing the real enemy savored watching her every move, an enemy that never wanted her out of its sight and would make her want to spend the rest of her life hiding. They died and they didn’t even get a chance to speculate on what this new world could possibly be like before they died, because they would have, the Quell or the Purge or even her- their?- fellow rebels.

“I killed her, Annie,” Frances is crying now. “Her name was Amber. She was from District One and she was best friends with her district partner and I killed him too. We were all allies once. And they were both kids, maybe even younger than Katniss. On my Victory Tour when I went to One her parents just cried on their stage. When I was in the Capitol and they injected me with the venom I _saw_ her and the boy too. It wasn’t real, but it was. Because I never stopped thinking about them. Or the others. And now it’s never going to happen again but it still doesn’t feel real.” Because not a day has gone by that Frances has not thought of Ermine being pulled under the surface or Martius’ peaceful face or the District Six girl screaming or watching Amber bleed out on top of her telling her _you can’t hide_ when neither could she, neither could any of them.

Annie is crying too, but less hard, exhaled shuddering breaths and glimmering eyes like she’s just come up from a long submerge underwater. She’s so beautiful, Frances thinks, the only person who can look like that crying. “It is real, Frances, it is. It’s not going to happen anymore.” She gestures toward the television, trying to smile. “See, the Capitol, they’re accepting the power of the Districts now. People from the districts will lead the country now. It’s all real, even if it doesn’t feel like it. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it, but it still is. Remember, when you told me that, after I got out of the arena?”

Annie gets down next to Frances in the bed and leans her head against her shoulder. Frances rubs her sleeve across her face and lets herself relax against Annie, and watches the screen.

“Yes,” Frances says, “I do.”

“We can go back to Four now,” Annie says, as if just realizing it, and Frances realizes that she’s right. Annie smiles, as if she’s thinking of a distant, pleasant memory. “We can live anywhere we like and go anywhere we like now. All of Four can be our home now.”

“I think it always was,” Frances says, and maybe that’s true. Maybe a home is something that you have to wait for, a broader area instead of one house, but it will be there all the same.

“Maybe,” Annie says, and Frances thinks that maybe Annie doesn’t look at it the same way. Maybe Four didn’t feel like home for Annie, not as long as she wasn’t allowed to think of anywhere else, not as long as it was a place she could be plucked from and left to drown in manufactured oceans far away. But now that it’s not, Frances supposes, maybe it feels more like home to her now. “Maybe it was always supposed to be. But it wasn’t until now.”

Frances nods. “I think,” she says, because that sounds right, too.

From the distance, outside the window, she can hear people chanting Paylor’s name, chanting _Panem Is Free_. Some- most- of them must be from the Capitol, she thinks, and wonders if the world is different or if it was always like this and it was just hidden.

She takes her left hand and places it against Annie’s hand. Annie’s calloused fingers gentle trace the spaces where her fingers were. With the remaining two fingers on her left hand, she takes hold of Annie’s hand as best as she can.

No one can claim hold of Annie, but sometimes she lets herself be held, and Frances is grateful that she’s the one who knows Annie well enough for that. She’s grateful that out of all the choices she’s been deprived of in life, she found Annie, and could choose to give herself over to her.

_

Frances barely remembers doing it, but when the hovercraft lands in Four, the moment her feet meet the sand-strewn ground she falls to her knees and tilts back her head and closes her eyes and stays there for a while, Annie standing with her feet firm on the ground, her hand on her shoulder. She feels Annie’s hand on her and the rock and sand under her knees and the cool breeze waving through her hair, and hears the gulls screaming and the waves in the distance, and smells the salt of the ocean. Their picture makes it to the covers of the newspapers in Four.

_Four’s last Victors, finally home,_ says one of the captions.

Frances supposes it’s close enough to the truth to feel right.

_

A few weeks after they return to Four, Frances and Annie having settled in her mother’s house – they went to the house as soon as they could to see if she was still alive, and she was, Frances thanks every saint and god she knows – a familiar name is broadcasted on the television. 

Maeve Odair doesn’t recognize the name, yet another Capitol denizen offering condolences, remorse, and a desire for peace to any District people watching. Annie might know the surname, but not so intimately as Frances does. And Frances, though she knows the surname, had never known of this girl before, this young woman who cannot be any older than she is.

“My name is Messalina Statler,” says the young woman on the screen, seemingly a guest in some talk show, relatively somberly clothed by Capitol standards in a powder blue dress with large shoulder pads, to match her solemn face that shares features with her father. “And I am here to apologize on behalf of my father, Otho Statler.” The host of the show is quiet, as if waiting to see what else Messalina will say.

Messalina looks at the camera directly. “Though his trial is ongoing, there is no doubt he will be found guilty of crimes against humanity, along with the rest of Coriolanus Snow’s surviving former cabinet members. He is my father, but that does not mean I have to pretend his part in the crimes of the government did not happen.” She closes her eyes as if to compose herself, but Frances thinks she’s already remarkably calm. “To everyone who suffered because of my father- all the tributes, all the District citizens, all the Capitol civilians who died when Snow used them as human shields. There are no words I can give to express your sorrow.” Her voice is thick with what sounds like true grief, Frances realizes. “I only hope that with the finances I have inherited upon his arrest, that I can use these funds and the influence they give to help make Panem a better, fairer place. It is the least I owe,” she says, her head high. The purple haired talk show host is dabbing her eye with a black handkerchief, and she starts to say something, but it doesn’t reach Frances.

“Frances, are you all right?” Annie asks. “I’m here. You’re in Four,” she says, and Frances realizes how she must have completely lost the past few minutes except for Messalina’s speech.

Did he do it to you too? Frances wonders. Did you know about me? How did I never wonder about his family? He said I was his favorite. Did he seem to care for you less than he cared for me? He must have. He always showed me off to the other people in the Capitol and said I was his, I was all his, he made me. Everyone he knew had to know. Why didn’t I know about you? Did you hate me? Did you hate yourself?

“I’m okay now,” Frances says softly.

“Are you sure?” her mother asks, putting a hand on her shoulder.

She looks at her mother. “I’ll tell you about it one day,” she says, “but yes.”

“Did you know her?” Annie asks gently.

“No,” Frances says. She looks at Annie. “But I knew her father,” she says, and sees that Annie understands.

She wonders how many secrets did she ever really know, and how much will be hidden forever, and how much of this will ever really end. She is certain that these thoughts have also gone through Messalina Statler’s mind. 

_

Annie has begun to hold meetings in the house that was once just Maeve Odair’s, but is now hers and Frances’ and Annie’s, and Frances has asked her mother if she minds their living there, and her mother says of course not, like Frances is out of her mind for asking. She sometimes wants to ask her mother if she knows what her relationship with Annie is, but she must, there’s no way she doesn’t. So she must be all right with it.

The meetings Annie holds are not exactly classes, because while she mostly knows and remembers the language her family told her, she isn’t the only one there who knows it, although some only know a few phrases here and there and some don’t know anything at all.

There are other countries, the news broadcasts have reported, full of people who are alive; even if the world isn’t perfect, it’s there. Diplomatic relationships have begun to form with Panem and other places. People have even begun to ride their cars and take the train over the northern and southern borders to get to the other places. There’s talk of an international airport being built with the funds offered by the son of Snow’s former Transportation Minister. Annie was right all along. Deep down, Frances thinks she knew, too, she was just afraid of hoping too much- if she had too much hope, she thinks she had supposed, it would have just led her to despair.

People of all ages come to the house; some even older than Mags, some of Reaping age (except there’s no such thing as Reaping age anymore, and using that phrase to describe young people will one day be just a strange expression from her generation), some are even families. They say they want to reconnect, or they want to learn more, or that their culture had been taken from them and denied of them but now they can have it back. There are so many people they can all barely fit in the living room, and Annie’s said to Frances that some of them want to use one of the former Victor’s houses- the Village is now abandoned- for a sort of language center. Sometimes Frances even hears them laughing together, in their language, these people who could not be destroyed.

Frances used to hear people say Annie’s laugh sounded mad, but Frances just thinks that when Annie laughs she’s uninhibited, she’s purely herself, whether or not she laughs in happiness. But lately, Frances notices, if she does, it’s because she’s happy. 

Sometimes Frances thinks she is, too.

_

When Annie and Frances are invited to District Seven to appear on a news interview along with Johanna (“the surviving Victors of the West Coast”), Johanna calls them on the telephone and leaves a message, saying “you can stay at my house instead of booking a hotel, why the hell not.” But Frances can tell there’s a weariness in her voice, and she wonders if the reason why Johanna clearly is asking them to stay is because she’s lonely. Which, of course she’s lonely, but she’d probably never admit to it. Sometimes Frances wonders if Johanna thinks being alone and in pain is something she sticks to out of loyalty to her family or self preservation or some combination of both- never wanting to let anyone close to her again. 

If Johanna let her, Frances would come as close as she needs. But that’s up to Johanna. You can’t force someone to feel better. But since Johanna is choosing to invite her and Annie to stay at her house, maybe this could be her taking a step towards that. Who knows what kind of steps people can take nowadays. Frances hasn’t even been oversleeping lately. She didn’t even notice as it was happening, that she wasn’t spending her free time mostly under the covers anymore.

Johanna’s house is a cabin on the edge of the woods, seemingly, far from other homes. But the view is beautiful- out of the front window you can see a clear stream of a crystalline blue color, and endless rows of evergreen trees that reach into the sky like towers. At night she can hear owls. It’s peaceful, in its own way, Frances supposes. She can understand why Johanna has found some kind of comfort disappearing here.

“Do you think she’s okay?” Annie whispers to her on their first night there. “I worry about her.”

“I do too,” Frances says, lowering her voice, knowing Johanna wouldn’t want her to say any of this at all.

_

Johanna serves home-brewed beer, and it’s dark and foamy. “I’ve never had anything like this,” Annie compliments her, “you’re really good at this.” Johanna’s mouth perks up in one corner. They drink for a while, the three of them, and at one point Annie makes eye contact with Frances, silently, before saying she thinks she’ll go up to bed.

Once they’re alone, Frances and Johanna are quiet for a few moments. Are you okay, Frances could ask. I’m sorry for not contacting you earlier, she could say. Why didn’t you try and talk to us until now, she could implore. Please tell me you haven’t lost contact with Katniss either, she lost Prim just like you lost your family; please tell me you’re not all alone here; please tell me you talk to the living sometimes, too, she could say. Frances understands a connection to the dead, though, and maybe that’s what she should start with.

“I knew a girl once. She told me I couldn’t ever hide,” Frances says, taking a long drink of the beer the color of dark wood. “It was a long time ago. At that part of my life, I also knew this boy and he told me he wanted me to live in honor.” She shrugs. “It’s taken me a long time to realize that maybe doing one of those things is the way to do the other, sometimes.”

Johanna looks at her flatly, raising her eyebrows, tucking her now chin-length hair back over her ears. “Yeah, and then you killed both of them. They only aired your Games about a million times the year you won, and every year after that,” Johanna says, smiling crookedly, and Frances almost laughs, because at least for a moment she’s managed to forget she’s famous and Johanna really is right, how could Frances not have known Johanna would have seen through her? She tries to return a smile, awkwardly, feeling her face warm a little.

“I’m not…mad,” Johanna says, although she hadn’t seemed so and Frances hadn’t asked her if she was. Maybe Johanna is just used to other people thinking she’s mad at her and being scared off from her. Maybe sometimes it’s the only way to express herself that makes sense. “It’s just….Frances, I know you think about them all the time. And when you tell those stories, people know. You don’t have to act like you’re in the Capitol. _I_ know because I actually know you. They were never just random people you happened to know a long time ago, not to you. You can say what you want now, you know.”

Sometimes Frances has thought to herself similar things, but she isn’t used to hearing others say them to her. Amber and Ermine and Martius, and everyone else, they’re all remembered just as people who she killed or people who couldn’t kill her. They were more than that but they never got to live their lives and they never got to be known or remembered, even in the horrible ways she experienced. There were days she’d thought she’d saved them, but there were more days she thought she’d stolen from them.

“Amber Koskinen. She tried to kill me and I killed her first. She was from District One. And Martius Bayer, he was…the last one. From District Two and he knew what I was going to do but he still…wished me the best anyway. Ermine Peake, from One, he and Amber were so close, they cared about each other so much, and I just watched him die. And…Dune Chumak, my District partner, he died before me. When we were all sleeping. And Morgan, Morgan Ironside, from Two. They were….they would have been my friends. And I’m the only one people remember now.” She doesn’t know when she started crying- Johanna hasn’t said anything about it, and looks at her with a grim sympathy.

“But you remember them,” she says, and Frances thinks she came to help Johanna, not the other way around, but things hardly ever go as planned, not really. 

“Johanna,” Frances says, her voice breaking too much to sound like someone with advice worth listening to. “I told you all that for you. Because I’m worried about you, and Annie is too, and this isn’t us feeling sorry for you, it’s us caring about you because you’re our friend. And I don’t want you to just live in seclusion the rest of your life because you deserve better than that and - “ she considers not saying this last part, but knows she has to- “your family wouldn’t want you to be unhappy forever.”

She half-expects Johanna to start yelling at her, to tell her she has no idea what her family would have wanted. And maybe that would be fair. But she just looks at Frances, half smiling, like she’s just heard something very fascinating, if exhausting.

“Being happy is hard,” Johanna says, “it’s not something you can just do. You know that.” Frances is about to say something, she doesn’t know what, when to her surprise, Johanna continues. “If I don’t let myself be comforted, then it’s like I’m not letting myself be hurt. That was how I looked at it for a while and I guess it worked, while it lasted.”

“While it lasted,” Frances says. “I guess I know a thing or two about that.”

“A lot of things don’t last,” Johanna agrees. “Maybe most. Remembering that saved me a lot of grief.” But not all of it, Frances thinks. Johanna looks at the table, tracing the wet circle left by her stein of beer. “Don’t worry about me, Frances,” she says. “Really. I don’t want morphling anymore, I do talk to people even if I live all the way out here, and…” she nods her head to herself. “I invited the two of you over because, fine, you’re right. I didn’t feel like being alone.” Her mouth goes up in a sad half-smile. “But I don’t feel alone when I’m in Seven anymore,” she says. “It…it’s starting to feel like home again, not that it ever didn’t, but … it’s not ever going to be the way it used to. But that’s fine.”

Frances takes a shaky inhaled breath. “I wish your family could be here with you,” she says.

“Yeah,” Johanna says quietly, maybe to hide the emotion in her voice. “I wish…fuck,” she says, her voice terse and thick with grief. “I wish no one we knew ever had to die the way they did, but wishing isn’t going to do anything about it. It never does,” she says as if explaining it to her. “So what I’m going to tell you instead,” Johanna continues like they were in some kind of trade-off and not a conversation, “is that I never thought you were weak, or depraved, or anything like that. _You_ did because people made you feel that way and it made me mad. Not really at you. It just made me mad that those people tried to make me think it was my fault that they killed my family, and it was your fault that they did what they did to you. I didn’t know how to make you get it. But I guess that was up to you,” she says, shrugging. “Some of these things are just up to us. We can have people helping, but some things are really up to you alone.”

“Even with people helping,” Frances says, resting her head in her hand, her elbow on the table, “those are the hardest things.”

“Yeah,” Johanna says, raising her eyebrows again. “I guess everything important is.” What was it that Frances had always been thinking about? The most necessary, and difficult.

“You are my friend, Johanna,” Frances says after a while. “You’re one of my closest friends. I just want you to know that. That there are people who care about you.”

Johanna swallows and her eyes shine and her posture is straight as one of the trees outside her house. Frances had once thought in a better world, Johanna would be a leader, one of the great names of history. But now the world is getting better, and maybe that just means Johanna can make her own life, a real life. Johanna doesn’t say anything, she just nods her head, and Frances wonders if she really hadn’t realized. Frances sees Johanna get out of her chair and move it a few feet around to the other side of the table next to Frances’ place and get down in it, and she puts her arm around Frances’ shoulders. “Look out the window,” Johanna says to her, her voice softer than Frances has ever heard her, and she does. “All those trees, as far as you can see,” she says. “You can walk in there for hours every day, and you’ll see something new each time, if you’re alone or if someone is with you to look at other perspectives. It’s…pure, there. Everything is real. No person made it, nature did. It makes you really see the world is something bigger than any of us. Something we might not be able to understand entirely, and sometimes it’s really fucking hard to live with that.” Johanna is quiet for a moment, which always kind of feels alarming to witness. “When I joined the rebellion, I was thinking of revenge. But now I think it was more than that for me, even if I didn’t know it,” she says, as if to herself. 

Frances looks at the forest, and thinks Johanna sees what Frances sees when she looks at the ocean, and she thinks Johanna might just be okay. “Thank you,” she tells her quietly, and she feels Johanna grip her left hand. A part of Frances that still wants to cry feels like wrapping her arms around Johanna’s head, where she’d been electrocuted so many times, but she doesn’t. Johanna wouldn’t feel better with that.

Johanna looks over to her, fondness in her foxlike eyes, her sharp features almost amused. “Don’t thank me,” she says, easygoing. “We’re friends. Isn’t this what friends do for each other?”

Frances supposes she’s right. She wraps her arms around Johanna’s shoulders, and Johanna says, good naturedly, “oh come on, don’t cry on me now,” and Frances doesn’t, and she realizes she’s laughing, and it reassures her that Johanna is too.

_

In the moments before she falls asleep, Frances decides to pray. To the Morrigna, in gratitude for helping her and Annie fight to survival, when they needed to, even if they’ll never need to again. To Patrick the Saint, to help her one day make up for the sins she once committed long ago at fourteen against people who were never her enemies. To the Magdala, and Dymphna the Martyress, to ask for intercession, to protect her and Annie and her mother, in their new lives. She prays to every she can remember, from the Stella-Maris and her Son the Lord, to Brigid, until all she can think of is to thank them.

In Johanna’s house, next to Annie, Frances dreams she’s in the ocean back at home. She’s fourteen years old and next to Dune and they’re leading Ermine and Amber, and Martius and Morgan, into the waves behind them. She’s teaching them to swim. “But don’t go too far,” she tells them. 

“Why? What’s out there?” Morgan asks.

“Well, that’s not why you shouldn’t go too far, if you go too far you might not be able to come back, and then there’s the currents,” Dune says.

“But what _is_ on the other side?” Amber says, looking at Frances, wanting her to answer.

“I…I don’t know,” Frances answers, “not yet, I don’t. But soon I will.” The sun is gold in the sky, casting glimmering rays of light over the sea. Ermine is treading water, and Martius rises up to the surface.

“I’m sure you will, fish girl,” Martius tells her, with complete sincerity.

Frances wakes up with a start, back in District Seven, twenty-four years old, next to Annie. Her movements seem to have woken Annie up.

“Frances?” Annie says, as she turns her head to the side. “Are you all right?”

She rubs her eye, realizing how awake she feels. “I’m fine,” she says, “I just…had this dream. It wasn’t a bad one. I’m just thinking about it.” She looks at Annie, how alert she looks. “You weren’t sleeping, were you,” she says.

Annie shakes her head, her eyes bright. “No. I couldn’t. Nothing is really wrong, I just wasn’t tired and I was just listening to the sounds outside. It’s so different from home,” she says, her eyes looking sideways, towards the open window, towards the winds through thick tree branches and owls calling and crickets chirping, the clear smell of pine and freshwater and soil. “I never really….saw anything when I was on my Victory Tour, you know?” Frances is sitting up by now, and shakes her head. “So it’s like I’m here for the first time and I just keep noticing things.” Annie’s eyes are determined and alive and, Frances thinks, contented. 

“Annie,” Frances says, her voice low. “Anywhere in the world you want to go. Whenever. I’ll come with you.” Annie takes her left hand, smiling with her mouth closed as slyly and engagingly as she had the day they first met. She’d be satisfied if they stayed in Four forever, but, Frances thinks, that’s not necessarily what she wants, and she knows that’s not what Annie wants, either. This is the first time it hasn’t felt bad to be away from home, she realizes. 

“I know,” Annie says. The corner of her mouth goes up. “I know you will. I mean, you’re going to.” Frances laughs a little, trying to be quiet so as not to wake Johanna up. “We have a lot of time for that, though,” she says, softer.

“I guess we should go to sleep. We do have to be on television tomorrow afternoon,” Frances says. It’s not that bad, she thinks. She can choose what to wear, and no one is telling her what to say, and she doesn’t know the reporter. It’s not like how it used to be. It never will be again, she keeps realizing, and every time it feels like the first time, half too good to be true and half too surprising to fully register.

Annie shrugs. “I can’t sleep,” she says, “and be honest, can you?” Frances shakes her head. Annie always knows, she thinks.

“Annie?” she says.

“Yeah,” Annie says quietly.

“I’m so glad we found each other. I don’t know what my life would have been if…” She doesn’t want to think about it, and she’s grateful she doesn’t have to.

“I know,” Annie says and wraps her arms around her, “I am too,” and for a while they don’t say anything, Frances just listens to the sounds from outside and Annie’s even breathing.

“I wonder if that river out there leads to the ocean,” Frances says after a while, listening to the freshwater streaming through the forest. It could, she thinks to herself, it could have been connected and she may never have known about it. But she does.

“We’ll have to find out tomorrow,” Annie resolves. “I wonder what it feels like,” she says, “I’ve never swam in fresh water before.”

“I guess we’ll have to find out what that’s like tomorrow as well,” Frances says to her. Annie spins a strand of Frances’ hair around her finger.

“So maybe we should get some rest, then,” Annie says.

“If you say so,” Frances tells her, her and Annie’s heads on the same pillow. Annie’s eyes close, though she’s not sure when Annie falls asleep. The water is flowing and the wind is rustling through the branches behind her and Annie is lying before her. She listens to the water, wondering where it leads, knowing regardless of where it ends up, she and Annie will always be able to find their way back home with each other, wherever they go.


End file.
